Question

Using only XSLT 1.0’s string functions, how would I go about slicing off the end of a url?

So from

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2981175/is-it-possible-to-slice-the-end-of-a-url-with-xslt-1-0

I would like to extract

is-it-possible-to-slice-the-end-of-a-url-with-xslt-1-0

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no substring-after-last function in XSLT/XPath 1.0. So to get the last part of an URL you would have to write a recursive template as explained by Jeni Tenisson:

<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>

This template would be called e.g. like this:

<xsl:call-template name="substring-after-last">
  <xsl:with-param name="string" select="$url" />
  <xsl:with-param name="delimiter" select="'/'" />
</xsl:call-template>