Question

What’s the options to show/output date in HTML in some sort of readable format. I mean if I simply show value of date_last_activity it looks wierd :S
So my question IS does XSLT offers any date format conversions at all?

XML:

<date_last_activity format="MMDDCCYY">04132012</date_last_activity>

XLS template:

<xsl:value-of select="date_last_activity"/>

HTML:

04132012

Would rather like it to look like 04/13/2012…

I readed a lot on XSLT one, I guess it’s possible to make “template” => formatDate… but no idea where to start :S

Answer 1

This transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="date_last_activity">
  <xsl:value-of select=
  "concat(
     substring(.,
               string-length(substring-before(@format, 'MM'))+1,
               2
               ),
     '/',
     substring(.,
               string-length(substring-before(@format, 'DD'))+1,
               2
               ),
     '/',
     substring(.,
               string-length(substring-before(@format, 'CCYY'))+1,
               4
               )

         )"/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied to the provided XML document:

<date_last_activity format="MMDDCCYY">04132012</date_last_activity>

produces the wanted, correct result:

04/13/2012

When the same transformation is applied to the following XML document:

<date_last_activity format="CCYYDDMM">20121304</date_last_activity>

the same correct result is produced:

04/13/2012