Compare date in XPath Expression

extkml · November 4th, 2009, 06:46 AM

I have orders.xml like the following

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<orders>
<order orderDate="1/1/2009" orderNo="1">
<customer id="nnghiem" name="nguyen nghiem"/>
<item id="item-1" price="25000" quantity="0"/>
<item id="item-2" price="22000" quantity="3"/>
</order>
<order orderDate="2/2/2009" orderNo="2">
<customer id="lp" name="lampard"/>
<item id="item-1" price="25000" quantity="2"/>
<item id="item-2" price="22000" quantity="8"/>
</order>
<order orderDate="3/3/2007" orderNo="3">
<customer id="nnghiem" name="nguyen nghiem"/>
<item id="item-1" price="25000" quantity="7"/>
<item id="item-2" price="22000" quantity="6"/>
</order>
</orders>

I want to retrieve every order in '2009
I solved this problem by the following way:

Code:

String exp = "/orders/order[substring(@orderDate,string-length(@orderDate)-3)='2009']";
//... some code lines

I wonder is there any way to compare date in this situation like this:

Code:

String exp = "/orders/order[@orderDate<'31/12/2009' and @orderDate>'1/1/2009']";

// get all orders between 1/1/2009 and 31/12/2009 (in year 2009)

but this exp will not return the expected result

How to solve this problem?

Thanks for your attention!

mhkay · November 4th, 2009, 06:53 AM

Never write dates as d/m/yyyy or m/d/yyyy. Firstly, no-one will know which format you intended; secondly you make it much harder to process the values. If you have existing data in this format, convert it to ISO format (yyyy-mm-dd) before you attempt to do any other processing with it.

You will then be able to use all the date-and-time handling machinery in XSLT 2.0 to process your dates, and even if you are using XSLT 1.0, you will be able to use library routines such as those in the EXSLT library.