Re: RE: creating a string of repeated charactors

Tim Watts wrote:

[snip]

> The EXSLT function <xsl:value-of select="str:padding(10, '*')" /> function
> is the sort of thing I hoped might exist in *standard* XSLT.
> 
> Since there isn't I'll use the template that you pointed me to instead.
> (Thanks for saving me from writing it! :) )
> 
> I was hoping that there might me a less verbose way of doing what really is
> quite a simple task.

This template is "verbose" by necessity -- it solves the ***general*** case, when
neither the filling characters, nor an upper limit for the length are nown in
advance.

It is also quite space-consuming (and time) -- because the string length is doubled
until a larger string is constructed, this will use twice as much memory, as
necessary for the resulting string.

In many cases one knows in advance that he'll only need a string of upto N
characters.

Then, a much simpler solution is to have a global variable pre-defined, containing
the maximum string:

<xsl:variable name="maxString" select="****************************"/>

and you'll construct any necessary string of length k <= N by simply:

<xsl:variable name="myRepeatingString" select="substring($maxString, 1, $k)"/>

In case you'd need repeating different character patterns at different times, but
still have a clear estimation of the upper limit for the resulting string length,
you can have a separate template, that will accept the character and the length as
parameters and will:

<xsl:variable name-maxString" select="concat($c,$c,$c,$c,$c,$c, ..., $c,$c)"/>
 N times ------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

<xsl:value-of select="substring($maxString, 1, $k)"/>

I believe that a sensible implementation of concat() will use less memory (than the
exslt str:padding template requires) in building the above concatenation string.

Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.

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