December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
774 pages
19h 30m
English
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Chapter 2. Strings
I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn’t trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than [a] string.
—Scott Adams
Introduction
When it comes to manipulating strings, XSLT 1.0 certainly lacks the heavy artillery of Perl. XSLT is a language optimized for processing XML markup, not strings. However, since XML is simply a structured form of text, string processing is inevitable in all but the most trivial transformation problems. Unfortunately, XSLT 1.0 has only nine standard functions for string processing. Java, on the other hand, has about two dozen, and Perl, the undisputed king of modern text-processing languages, has a couple dozen plus a highly advanced regular-expression engine.
With the emergence of XSLT 2.0 implementations, XSLT developers can dispense with their Perl string envy. XPath 2.0 now provides 20 functions related to string processing. The functions include support for regular expressions. In addition, XSLT 2.0 adds facilities for parsing unstructured text via regular expressions so it can be converted to proper XML.
XSLT 1.0 programmers have two choices when they need to perform advanced string processing. First, they can call out to external functions written in Java or some other language supported by their XSLT ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.