String processing with XSLT (Re: Understanding X

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 13:37:01 -0000, George James
<GeorgeJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Over on www.understandingxslt.com we are working through Jeni Tennison's
> Beginning XSLT book.
> 
> A number of questions have come up and not been answered.  We're all
> relative newbies over there so there's nobody to provide authoratative
> answers to these questions.
> 
> I'm just wondering if anyone here can answer any of them:
> 
> 1       Why does XSLT 1.0 have relatively poor string handling capabilities?

Other people provided some answers.

String processing is not hard using the FXSL library -- it simply has
functions (templates in XSLT 1.0) that take xs:string -s and treat an
xs:string as a sequence (list) of characters.

There are very powerful generic functions for primitive recursion with
accumulation:
str-foldl(), for iteration, for combining two or more strings, for
tokenization, for text justification, even spelling checking and
generation of candidate correct words has been demonstrated on this
mailing list.


Cheers,
Dimitre.