Substring,string-length function in xslt

Question

Basically I have a string created from a loop separated by commas eg. A,B,C, I want to get rid of the last comma.

<xsl:variable name="myConcatString">
   <xsl:for-each select="valueinElement">
        <xsl:value-of select="@attributeValue"/>,
   </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>


<xsl:variable name="valueLength" select="string-length($myConcatString)-1"/>
<xsl:value-of select="substring($myConcatString,1,$valueLength)"/>

Now the last line should give me A,B,C without the "," in the last. Can someone tell me what is going wrong?

Answer 1

You're outputting whitespace because of the way you've formatted the XML. You can fix it in two ways. One is to just remove the formatting:

<xsl:for-each select="valueinElement"><xsl:value-of select="@attributeValue"/>,</xsl:for-each>

The other, more robust way is to change the way you're handling whitespace:

<xsl:for-each select="valueinElement">
  <xsl:value-of select="@attributeValue"/>
  <xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>

What this is doing is treating just the comma as an element so that it ignores the surrounding whitespace, instead of treating all of the whitespace inside of the for-each loop as part of the output.

For reference, I ran the above XSLT snippets against the following XML file:

<root>
  <valueinElement attributeValue="dogs"/>
  <valueinElement attributeValue="cats"/>
  <valueinElement attributeValue="mice"/>
  <valueinElement attributeValue="lasers"/>
  <valueinElement attributeValue="frogs"/>
</root>

And got the following output in both cases:

dogs,cats,mice,lasers,frogs

Answer 2

Just use this replace, it will correct your output.

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

with

<xsl:value-of select="substring($myConcatString,0,$valueLength)"/>