Extract and format dates from xml using xslt

Question

A legacy system that I am working on has a piece of xml which has data embedded in one of the nodes which uses its own format - for some or other reason. I need to extract the information and then re-format the dates.

This is the piece of xml:

<Information>
[OB]LGW|Sun 23, May 2010|11:15|MCO|Sun 23, May 2010|15:25[/OB]
</Information>

I need it transformed to look like this:

<Flight 
  ArrivalDateTime="2010-05-16T15:35:00"
  DepartureDateTime="2010-05-16T11:30:00"
  DirectionInd="Outbound"
  RPH="1" 
  TravelCode="24"
  Type="Charter"
>

Answer 1

XPath function tokenize() might be of some use to you, as well as substring-after and substring-before.

Answer 2

Whenever I see an XML document like this, my first impulse is to make the person who created it do his job. Seriously, it's 2010. It is long past time to expect that if you're required to produce XML, that means that you produce usable XML, not data in your seekrit private format that's had tags wrapped around it. Emitting stuff like that is lazy and contemptuous.

Of course, it's not always possible to get people to behave like responsible professionals. My second approach is to preprocess the XML and repair it before it gets to XSLT, or to any other code that's expecting rationally-constructed XML. This saves me from having to figure out how to make XSLT do things that it was never designed to do. It also means that any non-XSLT code that processes this data downstream can be simpler.