Using Saxon 9.6, the following value in the select attribute of an <xsl:value-of instance

replace(., '(\\|\/)$' ,'')

gives a syntax error (stylesheet version attribute is 3.0).

The error message is as follows:
"FORX0002: Syntax error at character 6 in regular expression. Escape character not allowed"

The pattern seems to pass muster in a regex tester. Might someone be able to explain this error in the XSL processing context?

Thanks

Many regular expression dialects allow "/" to be escaped with a backslash, but the XPath dialect does not. Just remove the backslash. XPath prefers to reserve unused escape sequences for future use, to avoid compatibility problems later, whereas many dialects just ignore the backslash if the thing that follows is not a meta-character.

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

thank you for your quick and helpful response.