Question

I have a string in an XML file that looks similar to this:

M:Namespace.Class.Method(Something a, Something b)

The number of period (.) characters is abritrary, meaning it can be only 2 as in this example, but can be more.

I would like to use XSLT to get a substring of this string from the last ‘.’ character, so that i will only be left with:

Method(Something a, Something b)

I could not achieve this using the standard substring/substring-after functions.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

In XSLT 1.0 you will need to use a recursive template, like this:

  <xsl:template name="substring-after-last">
    <xsl:param name="string" />
    <xsl:param name="delimiter" />
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="contains($string, $delimiter)">
        <xsl:call-template name="substring-after-last">
          <xsl:with-param name="string"
            select="substring-after($string, $delimiter)" />
          <xsl:with-param name="delimiter" select="$delimiter" />
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of 
                  select="$string" /></xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>

and invoke it like this:

<xsl:call-template name="substring-after-last">
  <xsl:with-param name="string" select="'M:Namespace.Class.Method(Something a, Something b)'" />
  <xsl:with-param name="delimiter" select="'.'" />
</xsl:call-template>

In XSLT 2.0, you can use the tokenize() function and simply select the last item in the sequence:

tokenize('M:Namespace.Class.Method(Something a, Something b)','\.')[last()]