misterperl:

You're not showing any XML or XLST, so there's no way to help other than to guess.

My guess is that you're running into a quoting issue somewhere. $name looks quite like a perl variable, after all.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I showed the pertinent XML/XSLT - I program for a corporation and its all propriety so I can't really share the data. There is nothing to guess about really - this line

<xsl:if test="$name1 = $name2">
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produces that error. It doesn't matter what it's embedded in- that line produces that error, anywhere. Yes, XSL variables DO look like Perl variables. I didn't invent the xsl var syntax, so I don't know what you mean by that comment.

The question is really not about the particulars of the XSLT or XML. If there was a quote or any other syntax error, the browser wouldn't have rendered it. Unlike HTML, the XSL tags must be perfect, or the browser throws errors. As I said, the browser is very particular about things being pristine. No, the question is more about do I need to abandon XML::XSLT since I've apparently reached a practical limit of it's capability to support xsl 2.0. I'm planning to ask my Ruby coder down the hall if he has a Ruby method to render the HTML. I've never encountered something Perl wasn't up to doing, but it feels like this is the one....

You didn't show any code, example input, or expected output. You did say "I program for a corporation and its all propriety", but that doesn't prevent you from constructing a simple SSCCE that reproduces the issue. I had to build one myself, and only did that because I happened to be curious. I was able to reproduce the issue you described with XML::XSLT. Note that the latest non-developer release is now about 14 years old and the developer release 0.50_5 is ~5 years old.

I would recommend switching to XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT, where the variables seem to work as expected.

use warnings;
use strict;
use XML::LibXSLT;
use XML::LibXML;

my $source = XML::LibXML->load_xml( string => <<'END_XML' );
<foo>
    <x one="Foo" two="Bar" />
    <x one="Quz" two="Quz" />
</foo>
END_XML

my $style_doc = XML::LibXML->load_xml(
    string => <<'END_XSLT', no_cdata => 1 );
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<bar>
    <xsl:for-each select="foo/x">
        <xsl:variable name="name1" select="@one" />
        <xsl:variable name="name2" select="@two" />
        <xsl:if test="$name1 = $name2">
            <y><xsl:value-of select="@one"/></y>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
</bar>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
END_XSLT

my $xslt = XML::LibXSLT->new();
my $stylesheet = $xslt->parse_stylesheet($style_doc);
my $results = $stylesheet->transform($source);
print $stylesheet->output_as_bytes($results);

__END__

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<bar><y>Quz</y></bar>
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