I am familiar with using preceding axes in XSLT for finding determining the number of preceding elements given the current context. However, I don't see a way to do the same given a node that I've stored in a variable. For example:
<xsl:variable name="matchedBook" select="book[text()='The Hobbit']"/>
<xsl:variable name="precedingBookCount" select="count(???)"/>
Given the following XML, precedingBookCount should equal 3.
<available>
<book>Lord of the Rings</book>
<book>The Hunger Games</book>
</available>
<purchased>
<book>Ready Player One</book>
<book>The Hobbit</book>
<book>Lord of the Flies</book>
</purchased>
I see in XPath 2.0 that there is a NodeComp operator << that I could use, but this does not appear to be present in XPath 1.0.
How can I go about doing this in XPath 1.0 then?
