Re: Count leading spaces using xpath expression

--- Grainne Reilly  wrote:
 
> Hi,
> I am looking for a way to count the number of leading spaces in the
> text of 
> an element.  I have written the following template which does this:
> 
> 	<xsl:template name="countIndent">
> 		<xsl:param name="str" />
> 		<xsl:param name="leadingSpaces" select="0"/>
> 		<xsl:choose>
> 			<xsl:when test="(string-length($str) != 0) and 
> (normalize-space(substring($str, 1, 1)) = '' )" >
> 					<xsl:call-template name="countIndent">
> 					<xsl:with-param name="str" select="substring($str, 2)" />
> 					<xsl:with-param name="leadingSpaces" select="$leadingSpaces +
> 1"/>
> 				</xsl:call-template>
> 			</xsl:when>
> 			<xsl:otherwise>
> 				<xsl:value-of select="$leadingSpaces" />
> 			</xsl:otherwise>
> 		</xsl:choose>
> 	</xsl:template>
> 
> However, I'd like to get this information as an xpath expression (so
> I
> can 
> use it in a predicate e.g. /myElement[(indent expression) > 3]). Is
> this 
> possible (it would only have to work for spaces, not all whitespace)?
> Thanks for any advice.
> Grainne.

Hi Graine,

Use:

string-length(
              substring-before(translate($x, 
                                         translate($x, ' ', ''), 
                                         'Z'
                                          ), 
                               'Z'
                               )
              )



This is the double translate technique used by Mile Kay sometimes ago.

The inner translate() gets a string of all non-space characters in $x.
The outer translate() replaces the first non-space character in $x with
'Z'.

Then we have a string which is the same as the initial one, but the
first non-space character now is "Z'.

The rest is easy -- the group of leading spaces is immediately before
this 'Z', so we can get it using substring-before().

Then string-length() gives us the length of the group of leading
spaces.

So, if we have defined $x to contain '    xyz a b c  ' (four leading
spaces and three trailing), the above expression is evaluated to:

4


Hope this helped.



=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL

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