Can XSLT tell if there is a number as a value.

insanek · September 13th, 2005, 10:11 AM

Hi,
I need to be able to tell if there is number within tags, any ideas
if this can be done?

I currently have something like..

Code:

<xsl:when test="text()[starts-with(.,'10.')]">
    <h3><xsl:value-of select="."/></h3>
</xsl:when>

It currently checks to see if the paragraph starts with the number 10, but can
I check to see if a paragraph starts with any number?

mhkay · September 13th, 2005, 11:13 AM

You can test whether the first character is a digit using

translate(substring(.,1,1), '0123456789', '9999999999') = '9'

I'm not sure if that's exactly the test that you wanted.

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

insanek · September 14th, 2005, 03:17 AM

Thanks for the reply!
It looks very promising, though I'm quite new to XSLT- could you
break down the code for me, as I'm not exactly sure what it does.

thanks for help.

mhkay · September 14th, 2005, 03:24 AM

There are three operations here.

substring(X,1,1) extracts the first character of the string X

translate(X, 'abcd', 'pqrs') converts every a in X to a p, every b to a q, every c to an r, and every d to an s. In my example, every digit was turned into a '9'.

X = Y, when X and Y are both strings, tests whether they contain the same characters.

So the code is testing whether the first character is a digit.

I gave you an XSLT 1.0 solution: in XSLT 2.0 you can do regular expression tests, for example test="matches(., '\d.*')".

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

insanek · September 14th, 2005, 03:35 AM

thats great, thanks for the speedy reply!