Hi,

I need to eliminate ALL characters in a string (strExample) that are NOT 'Alpha' or 'Numeric' or '.' and return a single blank space for each occurence.

'2006/02/23' to be returned as:
'2006 02 23'

Is there an easy way using the translate function? Or am I thinking of the wrong method?

<xsl:variable name="AddrLine" select="translate(string($strExample),???? ,' ')"/>

i.e. If = a '(' character appears
do I use '!=chr(40)' or '!=#40;' ?

for all except either:
#48; - #57; (0-9)
#65; - #90; (A-Z)
#97; - #122; (a-z)

or
chr(48) - chr(57) (0-9)
chr(65) - chr(90) (A-Z)
chr(97) - chr(122)(a-z)

I wanted a better method than creating the following monster:
<xsl:variable name="AddrLine" select="translate(string($strExample),'!"£$%^&*() _=+@#?<>[]{}|`¬;:' ,' ')"/>

double quotes '"' causes a syntax problem in the above example.
I also realise that the characters '& < >' are '&amp; &lt; &gt;' respectively.



Also, which is = ' ' (SINGLE BLANK)

chr(160) or chr(173) ?


Neal

A Northern Soul

__________________
Neal

A Northern Soul

This is obviously a lot easier with the regular expression capabilities in XSLT 2.0. In 1.0, using translate(), there's a neat trick for *deleting* all characters outside a given set (say 0-9 for example):

translate($in, translate($in, '0123456789', ''), '')

which you can adapt by changing the last '' to a sufficiently-long string of spaces (and changing '0123...' to the set of characters you want to keep). Sufficiently-long means "at least as long as the number of different characters in $in", or if you prefer "at least as long as $in".

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

Excellent (though I had to read it through a couple of times).

Obviously for my purposes I have to increase the length of the last set of single quotes from '' to ' '.
Therefore:
<xsl:variable name="AddrLine" select="translate($strExample, translate($strExample, '0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz', ''), ' ')"/>

MANY THANKS!


Neal

A Northern Soul