Thanks for v the quick reply james but doesnt your approach imply that the tokenisation into sentences has already been done? Im trying t o avoid a two pass solution as I expect to be doing this hundreds of times reluctantly using Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> ________________________________ From: James Cummings <james@blushingbunny.net> Sent: Monday, November 5, 2018 1:10:02 PM To: Lou Burnard Cc: oxygen-user@oxygenxml.com Subject: Re: [oXygen-user] an xslt challenge Hi Lou, Would it make sense to use xsl:for-each-group to group the sentences into <s> units to make this easier? Then I'd probably recursively call a template or function passing the current collection of <s> units as a variable item* value, testing if its tokenised number is above or below $maxWords. Not got time to write that out as a solution atm, and I'm sure it can be done without the recursivity as well, but that is the approach that would have occurred to me at least. -James On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 12:03, Lou Burnard <lou.burnard@retired.ox.ac.uk<mailto:lou.burnard@retired.ox.ac.uk>> wrote: I hope I am not abusing this list in asking occasionally for advice on the best way to hack something in xslt. Today's problem is to output only the first x sentences (string terminated by a full stop) of a paragraph such that the total number of words (space delimited strings) is less than some limit (call it $maxWords) Since the sentences are of variable length, obviously I don't know what x is. Here's where I got to so far: <xsl:template match="t:p"> <xsl:variable name="pString"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:variable> <xsl:for-each select="tokenize($pString, '\.\s')"> <xsl:variable name="seq"> <xsl:value-of select="string(position())"/> </xsl:variable> <xsl:variable name="wordsSoFar"> <xsl:value-of select="string-length(translate(normalize-space (preceding-sibling::text()), ' ', '')) + 1"/> </xsl:variable> <xsl:if test="$wordsSoFar < $maxWords"> <s n="{$seq}"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </s> <xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> But this is not valid because preceding-sibling:: wants a node() not a string (even though "text()" *is* a node imho). Am I going about this entirely the wrong way? _______________________________________________ oXygen-user mailing list oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com<mailto:oXygen-user@oxygenxml.com> https://www.oxygenxml.com/mailman/listinfo/oxygen-user