Getting a substring of an attribute in XPATH

Question

Given

<foo>   <bar baz="Hello, World!"> </foo> 

How do I all but the last 4 characters of @baz? One of my attempts was:

/foo/bar/@baz[substring( ., 0, -4 )] 

Answer 1

Use:

substring(/foo/bar/@baz, string-length(/foo/bar/@baz)-3)  

Do note the 3 in the expression.

The following is wrong:

substring(/foo/bar/@baz, string-length(/foo/bar/@baz)-4)  

because this returns the last 5 characters of the string value of the baz attribute.

Answer 2

try this: substring-before(/foo/bar/@baz,"rld!")