Hello all,


can someone give me some advice on the following please:

Task #3
Finding the substring that exists after a reoccurring pattern ends when the pattern is not entirely uniform.

E.g. extracting the string after the last occurance of the pattern 'aaabbcc(any 3 to 7 characters)dddeeefff(any 2 to 4 characters)xxxyyyzzz'

For example, in the string:

Asdfkjxxyyzzhadjfhasdfkjhaaabbccs1fg2hdddeeefffsfg2xxyyzzasdfkjh asdasdi8haaabbccs1feedddeeefffmm11xxyyzz123867jhdla7s6

We want to find the substring: 123867jhdla7s6




Regards,
John

a) how is this related to XSLT?
b) why are you asking us to do your homework for you?

__________________
/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Think before you post: What have you tried?

its not homework, its a task that my boss gave me.

perhaps help would be nice not remarks like that

Well no offence, but you've got a weird boss. My boss has never assigned me a task like that.

My first question still stands - what has this got to do with XSLT?

The problem is simple string manipulation, testing if a string contains a value, and if so chopping the string in two, then testing the second part again.

__________________
/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Think before you post: What have you tried?

well you have to find the solution with xslt. I assume this is going to be a regex problem.

If its so simple can you solve it?

I wouldn't bother with regex. Just use contains() and substring() and a recursive template.

And no offence, but if I solved it _for_ you then it wouldn't help you learn would it (I'm assuming that is the whole point of your boss assigning you this task).

__________________
/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Think before you post: What have you tried?

How can you use contains and substring when you dont't know what the string contains?

Huh?

contains() and substring() take parameters - those parameters can either be variables you declare or nodes whose value is used. So you pass in the node or value you want to find as two variables.

Actually, you'd probably use substring-after rather than substring, but the same logic applies.

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/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Think before you post: What have you tried?

i know the functionality of contains and substring,

but you haven't helped at all.

You don't know what the string contains just that it has the pattern and you want the string after the pattern

>extracting the string after the last occurance of the pattern 'aaabbcc(any 3 to 7 characters)dddeeefff(any 2 to 4 characters)xxxyyyzzz'

Looks to me something like

replace($in, '.*?(aaabbcc.{3,7}dddeeefff.{2,4}xxxyyyzzz)*(.*)', '$2')

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