Saxon

Actually XSLT line causing this issue

<xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select="l1d | .//descriptor"/>

Could you please

(a) supply a repro - that is, a minimal stylesheet that exhibits the error

(b) try running it on a more recent release? - i.e. 9.8 or 9.9.

(c) check that you really don't have an expression containing a backslash (\). The most likely explanation of the error message is that you have accidentally used a backslash in place of a forwards slash, which is not allowed in XPath.

<xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select="l1d | .//descriptor"/>

Hi Michael, below is the xslt line which cause this error

<xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select="l1d | .//descriptor"/>

But below lines works

<xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select="l1d | //descriptor"/>

  <xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select="l1d"/>

<xsl:variable name="descriptor-nodes" select=".//descriptor"/>

I'm getting the same error with 9.8 version

I can't reproduce the problem. Please supply a complete stylesheet.

I can't get a clean compile out of this because of the xsl:include dependencies, but if I comment out the xsl:includes, I get only "missing function" errors, no syntax error on the instruction in question.

I wonder how you are running the transformation? In particular, I wonder if you're hitting the old JDK XML parser bug that sometimes corrupts XML attribute values? Which JDK version are you running under? Do you get a problem if you use Apache Xerces in place of the JDK parser?

we are on Java 1.8 and here is the code

we are not using any specific perser, then it might be one from JDK.

public File xsltTransform(File inputFile, File resultFile, File xsltFile) throws Exception {

Source src = new StreamSource(inputFile);
Transformer transformer = pFactory.newTransformer(new StreamSource(xsltFile));
StreamResult sr = new StreamResult(resultFile);
transformer.transform(src, sr);

}

This is all rather puzzling.

One thing I notice is that line #90 in the supplied file is only 83 characters long whereas the parser is reporting the location as column #144.

Do you get the same result if you attempt to run it from the command line?

I think it would be useful to trace exactly what attribute values are being passed from the XML parser to Saxon. We could do that by injecting a SAXFilter into the channel between the XML parser and the XSLT compiler. Something like this:

Source src = new StreamSource(inputFile);
TemplatesHandler handler = pFactory.newTemplatesHandler();
XMLFilterImpl filter = new XmlFilterImpl() {
   {
       setContentHandler(handler):
   }
   public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes atts) {
        if (localName.equals("variable")) {
             int index = atts.getIndex("", "select");
             if (index >= 0) {
                System.err.println(atts.getValue(index));
             }
        }
        super.startElement(uri, localName, qName, atts);
   }
}
XMLReader reader = SAXParserFactory.newInstance().newSAXParser().getXMLReader();
reader.setContentHandler(filter);
reader.parse(new InputSource(xsltFile);

May need to play with this a little to get more focussed information from the tracing, e.g. to display the location information. May also need to check that this is actually using the same XML parser that the failing run is using.