Hi,

I am trying to use the substring-before function with a regex.
I want to grab any number at the beginning of the string the preceeds a non-numerical char.

Normally the <title> would be 22-10 or 6.1

I want to grab the number (e.g. 22, 6) before the first non-numerical char.

This is not working...

substring-before(//ACM:title, [^0-9])"

Thanks

substring-before doesn't accept regular expressions as far as I'm aware.

If you're using XSLT 2.0 you have 3 XPATH functions, tokenize(), matches() and replace() which accept regular expression patterns, along with the <xsl:analyze-string> XSLT declaration.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Thanks... This leads me to another question. I am using the substring-before() to group-by in a for-each-group.

How would I uses the <xsl:analyze-string> to group-by?

Thanks,

here's an example:

if <Numbers>1,4,6,7,10</Numbers>

then the following would split this and output each number:

<xsl:analyze-string select="Numbers" regex="[0-9]">
  <xsl:matching-substring>
    <Number><xsl:sequence select="."/></Number>
  </xsl:matching-substring>
</xsl:analyze-string>

e.g.

<Number>1</Number><Number>2</Number>...

The inverse, where you split on the seperator:

<xsl:analyze-string select="Numbers" regex="[,]">
  <xsl:non-matching-substring>
    <Number><xsl:sequence select="."/></Number>
  </xsl:non-matching-substring>
</xsl:analyze-string>


/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

>I am trying to use the substring-before function with a regex.

Where did you find information that suggested you could do this? You can't.

>I want to grab the number (e.g. 22, 6) before the first non-numerical char.

You could use replace($input, '(^[0-9]*).*', '$1')

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

>How would I uses the <xsl:analyze-string> to group-by?

The group-by expression can be any XPath expression. It can call a user-defined function, and the user-defined function can use <xsl:analyze-string>.

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

Cool...Thank you!