Question

When I use the XML serializer to serialize a DateTime, it is written in the following format:

<Date>2007-11-14T12:01:00</Date> 

When passing this through an XSLT stylesheet to output HTML, how can I format this? In most cases I just need the date, and when I need the time I of course don’t want the ‘funny T’ in there.

Answer 1

Here are a couple of 1.0 templates that you can use:-

<xsl:template name='formatDate'>     <xsl:param name='dateTime' />     <xsl:variable name='date' select='substring-before($dateTime, 'T')' />     <xsl:variable name='year' select='substring-before($date, '-')' />     <xsl:variable name='month' select='substring-before(substring-after($date, '-'), '-')' />     <xsl:variable name='day' select='substring-after(substring-after($date, '-'), '-')' />     <xsl:value-of select='concat($day, ' ', $month, ' ', $year)' /> </xsl:template>  <xsl:template name='formatTime'>     <xsl:param name='dateTime' />     <xsl:value-of select='substring-after($dateTime, 'T')' /> </xsl:template> 

Call them with:-

    <xsl:call-template name='formatDate'>         <xsl:with-param name='dateTime' select='xpath' />     </xsl:call-template> 

and

    <xsl:call-template name='formatTime'>         <xsl:with-param name='dateTime' select='xpath' />     </xsl:call-template> 

where xpath is the path to an element or attribute that has the standard date time format.