Question

Need to convert a text value `2012-03-19′ into a date type, then extract the year component.

<xsl:variable name="dateValue" select="2012-03-19"/>
<xsl:variable name="year" select="year-from-date(date($dateValue))"/>

I’m using Saxon 2.0, but it’s complaining date function does not exist; I looked around Saxon’s documentation and could not find the function, so that’s clearly the issue, but I can’t find a suitable replacement.

Answer 1

I don’t think date() should be a function, you want the xs:date() data type.

Add the xs namespace and then prefix xs:date().

The following stylesheet, using any well-formed XML input, will produce 2012:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:variable name="dateValue" select="'2012-03-19'"/>
    <xsl:variable name="year" select="year-from-date(xs:date($dateValue))"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="$year"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Note that you also have to quote your select in your “dateValue” xsl:variable.