Is it possible to count files in directory using XSLT?

Question

I need a way to count the number of files in a directory and store that back to a variable .

<xsl:variable name="no_of_files" />

I am not getting any hint to proceed

Answer 1

You can pull in and count all XML documents in a directory with Saxon 9 doing e.g. count(collection('file:///C:/dir/subdir?select=*.xml')), see http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/index.html#!sourcedocs/collections. But the files need to be well-formed XML documents for that to work and will be loaded and parsed.

Answer 2

Another solution, which would not involve the expense of reading and parsing all the files in the directory, and which would include non-XML files, is to use the EXPath file extension. This is implemented in Saxon 9.5 PE.

See http://expath.org/spec/file

count(file:list($fir, $recursive))

Answer 3

I am not aware of a way to achieve this in pure XSLT. But even if it is possible - XSLT is clearly not a natural fit for the task.

There are other languages that are more apt to handle a file system. Either

• count the files in a directory beforehand (with a shell script or with the language that is executing Saxon) and pass this information to the XSLT processor as a parameter. See for example the Saxon documentation.

or

• execute external code from within XSLT to retrieve the file count. @Michael-O suggests one way to approach this here.

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On a different note, it might be interesting to know why you need a file count in the first place. Usually, if you describe your problem rather than your attempted solution, answers become more helpful.