XSLT, 2nd Edition

Name

concat()

Takes all of its arguments and concatenates them. Any arguments that are not strings are converted to strings as if processed by the string() function.

Syntax

[1.0] string concat(string, string, string*)
[2.0] xs:string concat(xs:anyAtomicType?, xs:anyAtomicType?, ...)

Inputs

Two or more strings. The concat() function is unique in that it may have any number of arguments.

[2.0] In XSLT 2.0, the arguments passed to the concat() function can be any atomic type. All of the values are converted to strings. If any of the arguments is the empty sequence, it is treated as a zero-length string. It is an error if any argument is a sequence with a length greater than 1.

Output

The concatenation of all of the input values.

Defined in

[1.0] XPath section 4.2, “String Functions.”

[2.0] XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators section 7.4, “Functions on String Values.”

Example

We’ll use this XML file to demonstrate how concat() works:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- albums.xml -->
<list xml:lang="en">
  <title>Albums I've bought recently:</title>
  <listitem>The Sacred Art of Dub</listitem>
  <listitem>Only the Poor Man Feel It</listitem>
  <listitem>Excitable Boy</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="sw">Aki Special</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="en-gb">Combat Rock</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="zu">Talking Timbuktu</listitem>
  <listitem xml:lang="jz">The Birth of the Cool</listitem>
</list>

In our stylesheet, we’ll use the concat() function to create filenames for various HTML files. The filenames are composed ...