SAXONICA

Saxon Documentation
Full Contents
About Saxon
Changes in this Release
Conditions of Use
Using XSLT 2.0
Using XQuery
Handling Source Documents
XML Schema Processing
The XPath API
Standards Conformance
Extensibility
Saxon Extensions
| Introduction
| EXSLT Extensions
| Extension attributes (XSLT only)
| Additional serialization parameters
» | Extension functions
| Extension instructions
Sample Saxon Applications
The Saxon SQL Extension
XSLT Elements
XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax
Function Library
XSLT Patterns

# saxon:lowest()

lowest(node-set-1 [, stored-expression])

This function returns (as a node-set) the node from node-set-1 that has the lowest value of the supplied stored expression, evaluated as a number. If the stored expression is omitted, the expression "number(.)" is evaluated: that is, the string value of the node, converted to a number. A stored expression may be obtained as the result of calling the saxon:expression function.

The stored expression is evaluated for each node in node-set-1 in turn, with that node as the context node, with the context position equal to the position of that node in node-set-1, and with the context size equal to the size of node-set-1. Any NaN values are ignored. If the node-set is empty, the result is an empty node-set. If several nodes have the lowest value, the result node-set contains the one that is first in document order. This differs from the EXSLT lowest() function, which returns all the nodes that have the minimum value.

Example: saxon:lowest(sale, saxon:expression('@price * @qty')) will evaluate price times quantity for each child <sale> element, and return the node for which this has the lowest value.

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