Very simple XSLT string question

Question

How would I do "substring(variable,1,1) between a-z or A-Z" then do X else do Y using XSLT? I know that one option would be using regex but I would expect there to be something that wasn't quite so much overkill.

Answer 1

A simple XSLT 1.0 solution:

This transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&gt;
 <xsl:output method="text"/>

 <xsl:variable name="vLetters"
  select="'ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'"/>

  <xsl:variable name="vText" select="'1Text'"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test=
          "contains($vLetters, substring($vText,1,1))">
            Letter
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          Not Letter
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on any XML document (not used), produces the wanted result:

      Not Letter

Depending on the specific case one can add whatever processing is necessary to each of the two "clauses" (<xsl:when> and <xsl:otherwise>) of the <xsl:choose> instruction.

Answer 2

And for XSLT 2.0, you can use the regular expression function matches:

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="matches($variable1, '^[a-zA-Z].*$')">
    Match
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
   NoMatch
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>