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 &lt; $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?