concatenating two xPaths in XSLT

Question

In my XSLT script I'm calling a recursive template and I want to pass a xPath as a parameter to each iteration. In each iteration I want to concatenate child's xPath(*/) to the current path (please refer the code). So I'm using concat() function, since it returns a string, I'm unable to use that path to print the content of that path.

<xsl:copy-of select="$path" /> <!--This requests a xPath, not a string-->

So can any one tell me how to concatenate two xpaths or how to convert a string to a xpath.

Thank you.

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:call-template name="repeatable" >
            <xsl:with-param name="limit" select="10" />
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template name="repeatable">
        <xsl:param name="index" select="1" />
        <xsl:param name="limit" select="1" />
        <xsl:param name="path" select="@*" />

        <xsl:copy-of select="$path" />

        <xsl:if test="($limit >= $index)">
            <xsl:call-template name="repeatable">
                <xsl:with-param name="index" select="$index + 1" />
                <xsl:with-param name="path" select="concat('*/', $path)" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>

Answer 1

While I'm waiting for you to respond to my question above, here's an XSLT that does what you seem to be trying to do:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="text" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="@*">
    <xsl:value-of select="concat(name(), ' = ', ., '&#xA;')"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:call-template name="repeatable" >
      <xsl:with-param name="limit" select="10" />
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="repeatable">
    <xsl:param name="index" select="1" />
    <xsl:param name="limit" select="1" />
    <xsl:param name="current" select="." />

    <xsl:apply-templates select="$current/@*" />

    <xsl:if test="($limit >= $index)">
      <xsl:call-template name="repeatable">
        <xsl:with-param name="index" select="$index + 1" />
        <xsl:with-param name="limit" select="$limit" />
        <xsl:with-param name="current" select="$current/*" />
      </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

When this is run on the following input:

<root a1="a" a2="b">
  <cont a3="c" a4="d">
    <child a5="e" a6="f" />
  </cont>
  <cont a7="g" a8="h">
    <child a9="i" a10="j">
      <subchild a11="k" a12="l" />
    </child>
  </cont>
</root>

The result is:

a1 = a
a2 = b
a3 = c
a4 = d
a7 = g
a8 = h
a5 = e
a6 = f
a9 = i
a10 = j
a11 = k
a12 = l

Is that close to what you are trying to do? If not, please clarify.

Answer 2

What you want to do is to dynamically create xpath and use it. This is possible in XSLT3.0 and the function to be used is evaluate().