Output Context Node (full path) in XSLT 1.0?

Question

For debugging purposes it would be handy to output the full path of the context node from within a template, is there unabbreviated xpath or function to report this ?

Example Template:

<xsl:template match="@first">
        <tr>
            <td>
                <xsl:value-of select="??WHAT TO PUT IN HERE??"/>
            </td>
        </tr>
</xsl:template>

Example (Abridged) input document:

<people>
<person>
<name first="alan">
...

The output from the template would be something like:

people / person / name / @first 

Or something similar.

Answer 1

This transformation produces an XPath expression for the wanted node:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:variable name="vNode" select=
        "/*/*[2]/*/@first"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="$vNode" mode="path"/>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="*" mode="path">
        <xsl:value-of select="concat('/',name())"/>
        <xsl:variable name="vnumPrecSiblings" select=
        "count(preceding-sibling::*[name()=name(current())])"/>
        <xsl:variable name="vnumFollSiblings" select=
        "count(following-sibling::*[name()=name(current())])"/>
        <xsl:if test="$vnumPrecSiblings or $vnumFollSiblings">
            <xsl:value-of select=
            "concat('[', $vnumPrecSiblings +1, ']')"/>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="@*" mode="path">
     <xsl:apply-templates select="ancestor::*" mode="path"/>
     <xsl:value-of select="concat('/@', name())"/>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on the following XML document:

<people>
 <person>
  <name first="betty" last="jones"/>
 </person>
 <person>
  <name first="alan" last="smith"/>
 </person>
</people>

the wanted, correct result is produced:

/people/person[2]/name/@first