I'm trying to convert a date e.g. '02/03/1980' to '19800302' in an XSL transform.

I've found this function FormatDate()

 <xsl:value-of select="formatDate(APPLICANT/DATEOFBIRTH, 'YYYYMMDD')" />

but it just errors saying formatDate is not a valid XSLT or XPATH function.

Any ideas how I could perform this conversion would be most appreciated.

Francis

format-date() is a new function in XSLT 2.0. It takes as input a value of type xs:date (whose lexical form is always the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD). Your input date is not in ISO format so you can't use this function even with XSLT 2.0.

You can solve the problem by extracting the components of the string using substring() and recombining them using concat().



Michael Kay
http://saxon.sf.net/

I was afraid you were going to say that.

I tried '02/03/1980':

<DATEOFBIRTH>
                <xsl:value-of select="concat(substring(APPLICANT/DATEOFBIRTH,7,10), substring(APPLICANT/DATEOFBIRTH,4,5), substring(APPLICANT/DATEOFBIRTH,1,2)) " />
            </DATEOFBIRTH>

and it created:

<DATEOFBIRTH>198003/1902</DATEOFBIRTH>

Most bizarre?

Not bizarre if you read the spec. Check the meaning of the third arg to substring - it's a length, not a position.

Michael Kay
http://saxon.sf.net/

Of course. Thanks for your help.