lower case the first character of a string using only xslt 1.0

Question

I have seen patterns for translating a string into lower (or upper case) using the translate function for folks stuck using xslt 1.0.

Is there a elegant way of just making the first letter of a string lowercase?

TestCase => testCase

Answer 1

Use the XPath translate function, having separated the string into first character and the rest. This will require somewhat long winded XSLT using multiple variables to hold intermediate results.

Answer 2

XSLT has a substring function, so you could use that pattern with the substring function to get what you want.

Answer 3

You should be able to combine substring and concat with translate to do it like so:

concat(translate(substring(s,1,1), $smallcase, $uppercase),substring(s,2))

Answer 4

If your string were, for example, in an attribute called name:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(translate(substring(@name, 1, 1), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'), substring(@name, 2))"/>