<xsl:when test="string-length( xpath value) is not working after xslt version upgrade to xslt 3.0 version

Question

<xsl:when test="string-length( xpath value) is not working after xslt version upgrade to xslt 3.0 version>

it is giving error

XPTY0004 A sequence of more than one item is not allowed as the first argument of fn:string-length() ("", " ")

but it was working correctly with 1.1 version

Answer 1

If you run XSLT version="1.0" code (and probably version="1.1" code as well) through an XSLT 2 or 3 processor that supports backwards compatible XPath 1.0 mode then some XPath 1.0 specific rules are applied, mainly that functions receiving sequences/node-sets but expecting a single item use the first item in the node-set/sequence.

In standards mode (XSLT version="2.0" or version="3.0") this is not the case, so you need to make sure that your argument to string-length is a single string and not a sequence of strings.

Answer 2

In XSLT 1.0, if you called a function such as string-length() supplying a set of multiple nodes in the argument, it ignored all nodes except the first.

This led to so many bugs that the rule was changed in 2.0, so supplying more than one node is an error. If you want the first node rule, change string-length(PATH) to string-length((PATH)[1]) . (You can also leave the stylesheet version set to 1.0 to get backwards compatibility mode.)