Question

When my XSL stylesheets encounters this node:

<node attribute="3"/>

…it should transform it into this node:

<node attribute="***"/>

My template matches the attribute and recreates it, but I don’t know how to set the value to: the character ‘*’ repeated as many times as the value of the original attribute.

<xsl:template match="node/@attribute">
    <xsl:variable name="repeat" select="."/>
    <xsl:attribute name="attribute">
        <!-- What goes here? I think I can do something with $repeat... -->
    </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>

Thanks!

Answer 1

A fairly dirty but pragmatic approach would be to make a call on what’s the highest number you ever expect to see in attribute, then use

substring("****...", 1, $repeat)

where you have as many *s in that string as that maximum number you expect. But I hope that there’s something better!