Michael,

Your example is quite clear, but raises the issue of "what is identity?", a 
problem I also had after a careful reading of David's answer. Looking at 
your (C,D,E, D,E,E) example, my naive definition would be that "node 
identity is determined by a selected node's location within the source 
tree -- one node is identical to another, and thus is a duplicate, if they 
both shared the same location in the source tree". Or do I still have it 
wrong?

Mark



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:28 PM

Subject: RE: [xsl] What does the phrase "duplicates removed" mean precisely?





When an operation like a path expression or a union is defined to return a

sequence of nodes with duplicates removed, this simply means that you 
won't

get the same node appearing twice in the sequence. For example, if element 
A

has four children B, C, D, and E (in that order) then the path expression

child::*/following-sibling::* selects a sequence containing (C, D, E),

rather than (C, D, E, D, E, E) which is what you would get if duplicates

were not removed. This depends on the concept that nodes have an 
individual

identity. Nodes are duplicates if they have the same identity - the name 
and

value/content of the node are irrelevant.



Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Wilson [mailto:drmark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 31 January 2006 13:52
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] What does the phrase "duplicates removed" mean
precisely?

In reading Michael Kay's XPath 2.0, I frequently encountered
the phrase,
"...returned with no duplicates...". I checked the FAQ
mantained by Dave
Pawson under both XSLT Terminology -- where "duplicates" is
used to define
the term "Node Set" -- and under XSL Frequently Asked Questions where
"duplicates" has its own heading. From that reading, I am all
but convinced
that "duplicates" refers to the (I cannot recall the correct
XML term)
content text demarked by a starting and ending XML element pair, as in

    <SomeTag>This is the text</SomeTag>



Is this correct, or is my understanding imperfect? Are there
any other kind
of "duplicates" removed?

Thanks,
Mark