Does anyone have a code example to search the contents of a node for a piece of search text, and return a number of instances please? XSLT1.0

I currently use the contains() function to determine whether the search text exists or not, but this is too simplistic and only gives a yes/no rather than the count that I require.

I was thinking I might have to have a recursive function and use substring-before/after but I don't want to over-engineer if there's a more obvious way that I'm just not seeing.

Thanks very much for any help

Andrew

In 2.0 you can use xsl:analyze-string:

<xsl:variable name="hits" as="text()*">
  <xsl:analyze-string select="..the text.." regex="..the pattern..">
    <xsl:matching-substring>1</xsl:matching-substring>
    <xsl:non-matching-substring/>
  </xsl:analyze-string>
</xsl:variable>
There were <xsl:value-of select="count($hits)"/> hits

In 1.0 your approach of recursion using substring-before/after is the only way to do it.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference