Question about XPath with functions in it

Question

this is a follow-up question of my previous thread:

Please help me on understanding this XPath

I have an XPath as:

Answer 1

preceding-sibling:: is an axis which returns a nodeset. In this case, * tells it all preceding siblings. count() counts the number of nodes in a nodeset. So, this part of the expression gives us the total number of nodes that have the same parent as the current node which appear before it in the document.