Question

I am trying to emulate StringBuilder behavior in an XSL. Is there a way to do this. It seems pretty hard given the fact that XSLT is a functional programming language

Answer 1

You can get the accumulting concats quite simply with just a little bit of recursion if you’re looking at a node-set (so long as you can construct the xpath to find the node-set), doing this so you can add arbitrary bits and pieces in and out of the flow it starts getting messy.

Try this for starters (does join as well):

<xsl:template match='/'>      <xsl:variable name='s'>         <xsl:call-template name='stringbuilder'>             <xsl:with-param name='data' select='*' /><!-- your path here -->         </xsl:call-template>      </xsl:variable>      <xsl:value-of select='$s' /><!-- now contains a big concat string --> </xsl:template>  <xsl:template name='stringbuilder'>     <xsl:param name='data'/>     <xsl:param name='join' select=''''/>     <xsl:for-each select='$data/*'>         <xsl:choose>             <xsl:when test='not(position()=1)'>                 <xsl:value-of select='concat($join,child::text())'/>             </xsl:when>             <xsl:otherwise>                 <xsl:value-of select='child::text()'/>             </xsl:otherwise>         </xsl:choose>            </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> 

All manner of extensions to that may be required: perhaps you want to trim, perhaps you want to tunnel through hierarchies as well. I’m not sure a bulletproof general solution exists.