RE: parsing string or numbers after x characters

> My problem is that I receive for example a date in a 
> concatenated format:
> 
> Ex: 20041207
> 
> And I have to retrieve it in a readable format through my xslt-fo 
> transformation.
> 
> Ex. 12 July 2004

Are you sure that date is 12 July and not 7 December? Probably a stupid
question, it's just that I've never seen dates written as YYYYDDMM before.

Anyway: two solutions. I'll assume the value is in $d.

XSLT 2.0:

format-date(
  xs:date(
    concat(
      substring($d,1,4),
      '-',
      substring($d,7,2),
      '-',
      substring($d,5,2))),
    '[D01] [MNn] [Y0001]')

XSLT 1.0:

   concat(
      substring($d,1,4),
      '-',
      $months/m[number(substring($d,7,2))],
      '-',
      substring($d,5,2))> 

where $months is

<xsl:variable name="months">
<m>January</m>
<m>February</m>

etc.

Michael Kay


> I tried using the substring attribute for that, but I don't have any 
> reference character to look at so it doesn't work. Is there a 
> function 
> which parses strings or numbers after a certain amount of characters 
> directly?
> 
> Thanks in advance for those which will response.
> 
> 
> Julien