Get Nth child of a node using xpath

Question

My sample input XML is:

<root>  <a>    <b>item</b>    <b>item1</b>    <b>item2</b>    <b>item3</b>    <b>item4</b>  </a> </root> 

I am suppose to select a node b whose position is the value of a variable.

How can I use the value of a variable to test the position of a node?

Answer 1

you can use this:

/root/a/b[position()=$variable] 

position() is 1 based

http://saxon.sourceforge.net/saxon6.5.3/expressions.html