Hi,

I must confess I am an absolute XSLT newbie. The task at my hand is to convert some TV guide listing XML into another XML that can be read by a program (XMLTV format). I got most of it working except for the date conversion from epoch to YYYYMMDDHHMMSS +GMT format.

I got some javascript code on the web for conversion of epoch date to other formats but I do not know how to use it. I am hopoing someone would kindly help me with this.

My XSL is as follows.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

    <xsl:key name="unique-channel" match="Srikanth/programme" use="chanid"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">

        <xsl:element name="tv">
            <xsl:for-each select="Srikanth/programme[count(. | key('unique-channel', chanid)[1]) = 1]">
                <xsl:sort select="chanid"/>
                <xsl:element name="channel">
                    <xsl:attribute name="id">
                        <xsl:value-of select="chanid"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <xsl:element name="display-name">
                        <xsl:value-of select="channame"/>
                    </xsl:element>
                </xsl:element>
            </xsl:for-each>

            <xsl:for-each select="Srikanth/programme">
                <xsl:sort select="chanid"/>
                <xsl:sort select="startdate"/>
                <xsl:sort select="starttime"/>

                <xsl:element name="programme">
                    <xsl:attribute name="start">


                        <xsl:value-of select="starttimesecs"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <xsl:attribute name="stop">
                        <xsl:value-of select="endtimesecs"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <xsl:attribute name="channel">
                        <xsl:value-of select="chanid"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <xsl:element name="title">
                        <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(name)"/>
                    </xsl:element>
                    <xsl:element name="desc">
                        <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(desc)"/>
                    </xsl:element>
                    <xsl:element name="category">
                        <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(catname)"/>
                    </xsl:element>
                    <xsl:element name="episode-num">
                        <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(epname)"/>
                    </xsl:element>
                </xsl:element>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


The starttimesecs and endtimesecs are in epoch seconds. I found by googling that the following javascript can convert epoch to date format.

var myDate = new Date( your epoch date *1000);
document.write(myDate.toGMTString()+"<br>"+myDate. toLocaleString());

How do I use this code in my XSL to create an output XML document? I am using Stylus Studio to get the output XML.

Example:
epoch Date: 1220286782
Output XML Date: 20080901220302 +0530

Could somebody [u]PLEASE </u>help me?

Thanks,
Srikanth Koka

Looks like you are using XSLT 1.0. Date/time manipulation is much easier in XSLT 2.0, so switch to 2.0 if that's an option. Some XSLT 1.0 processors allow calling out to Javascript, others to Java, so calling an external function might be an option if your code doesn't have to be portable.

The other option is to use date:add-duration() from www.exslt.org. (The epoch date, if I remember correctly, is the number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970, so you can convert it to a proper timestamp by treating it as a duration and adding it to the baseline date/time).

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