Question

I am generating MySQL’s create table statements. My source XML looks like:

<table name="TabName">
  <column> ... </column> <!-- multiple columns -->
  <primary-key> ... </primary-key>
  <foreign-key> ... </foreign-key> <!-- multiple FKs -->
  <key>... </key> <!-- multiple indexes -->
</table>

Transformatin is done like

<xsl:for-each select="column"> blabla ,</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:if test="primary-key"> blabla, </xsl:if>
<xsl:for-each select="key"> blabla, </xsl:for-each>
<xsl:for-each select="foreign-key"> blabla, </xsl:for-each>

Please notice that I append comma at the end of every statement. Following SQL output then looks like:

    CREATE TABLE`categories` (
          `CategoryID` tinyint(5) unsigned NOT NULL,
          `CategoryName` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
          `Description` mediumtext NOT NULL,
          `Picture` varchar(50) NOT NULL, 
           PRIMARY KEY (`CategoryID`),) --here is bad column     
   ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

How can I remove that comma when doing XSLT transformation? Thanks

Answer 1

For fixed strings that contain commas, look at the substring-before-last function I implemented as an answer to another question.

If you create the comma yourself in XSLT, just avoid creating if it would be wrong.

<xsl:for-each select="...">
  <!-- ... -->
  <xsl:if test="position() &lt; last()">,</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>