XSLT Cookbook

Replacing Text

Problem

You want to replace all occurrences of a substring within a target string with another string.

Solution

The following recursive template replaces all occurrences of a search string with a replacement string.

<xsl:template name="search-and-replace">
     <xsl:param name="input"/>
     <xsl:param name="search-string"/>
     <xsl:param name="replace-string"/>
     <xsl:choose>
          <!-- See if the input contains the search string -->
          <xsl:when test="$search-string and 
                           contains($input,$search-string)">
          <!-- If so, then concatenate the substring before the search
          string to the replacement string and to the result of
          recursively applying this template to the remaining substring.
          -->
               <xsl:value-of 
                    select="substring-before($input,$search-string)"/>
               <xsl:value-of select="$replace-string"/>
               <xsl:call-template name="search-and-replace">
                    <xsl:with-param name="input"
                    select="substring-after($input,$search-string)"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="search-string" 
                    select="$search-string"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="replace-string" 
                        select="$replace-string"/>
               </xsl:call-template>
          </xsl:when>
          <xsl:otherwise>
               <!-- There are no more occurences of the search string so 
               just return the current input string -->
               <xsl:value-of select="$input"/>
          </xsl:otherwise>
     </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

If you want to replace only whole words, then you must ensure that the characters immediately before and after the search string are in the class of characters considered word delimiters. We chose the characters in the variable $punc ...