Re: Re: "if-condition-return something" idiom : is it

"If you're stuck with XSLT 1.0, this is going to be painful,"
Yes, I know ....
"because XSLT 1.0 doesn't have regular expressions."
Yes, I know ....

"From what you're describing, this problem alone would make shifting to a 2.0
toolchain worthwhile."
It's DocBook, which is XSLT 1, so I don't (think I) have a choice.

"In general, I've found that per-weird-input-format date management is
troubling, because there are so many and many of them overlap."
It doesn't need to be a completely general solution.  I have a selection of
formats used in existing documents.  They are all UK so I don't need to worry
about UK/US number order.
Expressed as (very) pseudo-REs they are something like:
   "dd? MMM(M{0,6}).? (cc)?yy"
   "MMM(M{0,6}).? (cc)?yy"
   "dd?/mm?/(cc)?yy"
   "mm?/(cc)?yy"
(where d, m, c and y are numeric, M is alphabetic.  Calculations are done to
convert 2 digit years to 4 digit.)

"It's worked better to define a year variable, which contains the
preference-order (meaning, your preference for what test to believe the
results of) attempt to extract a year value and with a default of "nope"
so failure can be detected, and then the same with the month.  The
template then checks for failure and if it can, returns the assembled
year-month pair composed in whatever format's appropriate."

I'll have a look at this but I'm not sure it's that different to what I'm
doing now, which is :
1.  See if it matches "dd? MMM(M{0,6}).? (cc)?yy" or "MMM(M{0,6}).? (cc)?yy".
If it doesn't,
2. see if it matches "dd?/mm?/(cc)?yy" or "mm?/(cc)?yy".

And that's the first instance of the if-condition-return idiom.

Uncertainly,
Richard.





________________________________________
From: Graydon graydon@xxxxxxxxx [xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 16 June 2014 14:36
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  Re: "if-condition-return something" idiom : is it possible
in XSLT 1 ?

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 01:11:41PM -0000, Kerry, Richard
richard.kerry@xxxxxxxx scripsit:
> What I am doing is writing a callable template which will give dates
> in the form yyyy-mm (y and m numeric) when given dates in a variety of
> formats including those with strings for months (dd MMM yy,
> dd/mm/yyyy, mm/yy, and many others).  So the input is a single string
> which needs to be tested against a number of different formats and
> picked apart accordingly.  Perhaps I can partly pick it apart then put
> the parts into a node-set and get a template called on that.

If you're stuck with XSLT 1.0, this is going to be painful, because XSLT
1.0 doesn't have regular expressions.