XSLT conversion of string representation of date (01 Jan 00) into xs:date

Question

Hello,

I'm stuck with a string conversion to xs:date. I would really appreciate any help and tips!

I have a string that represents date in the format of "01 Jan 00", which I need to convert to xs:date, so that I can manipulate it further.

Is there a function or something already there so that I can convert my so ever difficult string representation of date? Would I need to write a function from scratch to convert month in "MN" format into its number representation?

Please help! :) Thank you!

Daria

Answer 1

The EXSLT library might be a good option: http://www.exslt.org/

Answer 2

i think you'll need a function for this one. something similar is described here

Answer 3

You could bind an extension function to convert the date string to the desired format. The exact mechanism will depend on your XSLT engine.

In .NET, we can take the following method:

public class DateConv
{
    public string AsXsDate( string date )
    {
        return DateTime.Parse(date).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");
    }
}

XsltArgumentList args = new XsltArgumentList();
args.AddExtensionObject("urn:date-conv", new DateConv());

xslt.Transform( input, args output );

and use it in a stylesheet like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:date="urn:date-conv">

    <xsl:template match="bookstore">
        <xsl:value-of select="date:AsXsDate('01 Jan 00')"/>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 4

I ended up writing a simple function that would determine between two date formats I have in my XML: "01 Jan 00" and a standard date-time string "2000-01-01"; and convert the non-standard to standard "YYYY-MM-DD".

Then I use EXSLT functions (http://www.exslt.org/date/index.html) to manipulate with dates further.