Remove characters using xsl

Question

I need to remove the following characters from a string value using xsl 1.0

*, /, \, #, %, !, @, $, (, ), &

I have come up with the following:

translate(translate(translate(string(//xpath/@value),'.',''),'/',''),',','')

In the above approach, I would have to duplicate the same code many times (one time per character).

How can I achieve the same goal without duplicating the code?

Thanks :-)

Answer 1

The translate() function accepts as its second and third argument two strings -- not just two characters.

translate(., $string1, '')

produces a string which is the string value of the context (current) node in which any occurence of a character that is in $string1 is deleted.

Therefore you can use:

translate(expressionSelectingNode, "/\#%!@$()&", "")

to delete any of the characters contained in the second argument.

Of course, if the translate() function is used within an XSLT stylesheet (or, generally within an XML document), some special characters, such as < and & must be escaped respectively as < and &.

Using this is so powerful, that one can remove a set of unknown characters:

Imagine that you want to remove from any string all characters that are not numeric. We don't know in advance what characters would be present in the string, therefore we cannot just enumerate them in the second argument of translate(). However we can still delete all these unknown charcters like that:

translate(., translate(., '0123456789', ''), '')

The inner translate() produces the string sans any digits.

The outer translate() deletes all this non-digit characters (found by the inner translate()) from the original string -- therefore what remains are only the digit characters.