Question

Can someone tell me why this is not working?

Throughout my document I have several column breaks marked as follows: <cb ed="#S" n="45rb"/>
The hash tag is there to refer to another element where the source document is identified.

Now I want to display the column break in the following document. So that it looks like this:
|S45rb|. I thought I could use a simple substring function to get rid of the hash tag like so.

<xsl:template match="TU:cb">
    <xsl:variable name="hashms"><xsl:value-of select="//TU:cb/@ed"/></xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="ms"><xsl:value-of select="substring($hashms,1,1)"/></xsl:variable>      

    <span>| <xsl:value-of select="$ms"/> <xsl:value-of select="//TU:cb/@n"/> |</span>
</xsl:template>

When I do it this way I get the following result: |#75ra|. Shouldn’t the first 1 in the argument refer to the first character of the string and then the second 1 tell it to move over one character and leave me with the desired S? Instead I don’t get the S but only the hash tag. Is there something about hash tags and strings I do not know?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

XSL is not 0 base, if you want to start at the second character (after the #), it should be 2 rather than 1.

http://www.w3schools.com/Xpath/xpath_functions.asp

substring($hashms,2,1) = S

You can also omit the length, which might be of benefit for extensibility later on. Especially if whatever comes after the # is the identifier, why limit your code?

substring($hashms,2) = S
substring('#S2',2) = S2