String expressions in XSL

[Michael Kay]

>There seems to be _no_ string expression language neither
>for patterns nor for "value-of".
>I guess my problems are not too special.
>
I too was very surprised by the omission of string
manipulation facilities in XSL. I think XSL has been
designed rather on the assumption that your XML document
contains the character strings you want the user to see, and
the purpose of the stylesheet is to control where and how to
display them. Hence also the omission of features such as
sorting and totalling, date localisation, etc.

I would solve the problem by using my SAXON library to
convert the XML document to another XML document that
contains precisely the character content you want to
display, and then use XSL to render it. Or use SAXON to
generate the target HTML directly, if it's not too complex.

SAXON is on http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/saxon.html

Regards, Mike Kay


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