XSLT, 2nd Edition

Name

[2.0] <xsl:analyze-string>

Allows you to compare a string and a regular expression.

Changes in XSLT 2.0

<xsl:analyze-string> is new to XSLT 2.0.

Category

Instruction.

Required Attributes

select

An XPath expression that defines the string to be analyzed. The expression is converted to a string if necessary.

regex

The regular expression. Regular expressions commonly use curly braces ({ and }), which XSLT interprets as the start and end of an attribute value template. For this reason, any curly braces in a regular expression must be doubled. For example, the regular expression "[0-9]{{5}}" matches a five-digit number, while "[0-9]{5}" matches a one-digit number followed by the number 5.

Note

It is a fatal error if the regular expression matches a zero-length string. See Appendix E for more details.

Optional Attribute

flags

The flags attribute modifies how the regular expression is processed. There are four different flags:

s

Regular expressions are evaluated in what the specs refer to as “dot-all” mode. When this flag is used, the dot operator (.) matches any character. Under normal processing (without the s flag), the dot operator matches any character except the newline character (#xA). This flag is useful when you want to match strings that might include a newline character.

m

Regular expressions are evaulated in multiline mode. By default, the meta-character (^) matches the start of the entire string, while $ matches the end of the entire string. In multiline mode, ^ matches the start of any ...