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XSLT, XPath and InStr

Answer 1

+12 A:

String handling is not something XSLT is amazing at but there are a few options.

In this case you might try:

//competition[contains(@name,'Prem')]

see here for more options and details

annakata 2008-12-01 11:33:19

And if you want just the id then //competition[contains(@name,"Prem")]/@id

Andrew Cox 2008-12-01 11:35:47

bah - too used to working with nodesets

annakata 2008-12-01 11:44:20

the "//" is probably inadvisable too before anyone else mentions it - I just didn't know any other structure to path on obviously.

annakata 2008-12-01 11:45:06

Annakata, I think you're a little bit wrong about the string-handling capabilities of XSLT. Do have a look at my blog where you'll find a few interesting examples to the contrary. :) Cheers

Dimitre Novatchev 2008-12-02 04:47:59

@Dimitre - I make that statement in reference to really solid string-feature languages like perl and JS, and with the awkwardness of tasks like string.replace in mind. I love XSLT as much as the next XSLT fanboy :)

annakata 2008-12-02 08:45:36

@Annacata, nice to here you're an XSLT fan :) But really, I've done spelling checking, concordance building, solved Tim Bray's Wide Finder in just 22 lines, provided a general LR parser, used it to parse JSON and XPath 2 ... all that in pure XSLT. What other string-processing challenge do we need?

Dimitre Novatchev 2008-12-02 21:56:54

@dimitre - impressed by spell checking. I would suggest though that just because something is possible doesn't mean it's efficient. You can't tell me search-and-replace in XSLT is elegant. I'd be interested to see how your pure XSLT approach benchmarks vs (e.g.) .net xslt extension arguments.

annakata 2008-12-03 09:12:26

@Annacata, it is not the language but the algorithm used. I guess that the XPath 2.0 standard function replace(), which uses RegEx-s will not be very different in efficiency than a .NET extension function. Of course, in .NET one will have to use (for now) a non-MS product, such as Saxon.NET

Dimitre Novatchev 2008-12-06 04:31:30

Answer 2

+1 A:

There is also a "matches" function, which uses regular expressions, but this is only available in XSL 2.0.

darasd 2008-12-01 12:38:32

Answer 3

+5 A:

Use:

//competition[contains(@name, 'Prem')]/@id

In other situations such functions as: starts-with() or ends-with() (XPath 2.0 only) can be useful.

Dimitre Novatchev 2008-12-01 13:31:44

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