translate

translate(string, abc, XYZ)

string

The string to evaluate.

abc

The string of characters that will be replaced.

XYZ

The string of characters used for replacement. The first character in XYZ will replace every occurrence of the first character in abc that appears in string.

The translated string.

For every character in string, if abc contains that character, it is replaced with the character at the same index in XYZ. If abc does not contain that character, it is kept as-is.

• If abc is longer than XYZ, then the extra characters at the end of abc are mapped to the empty string (i.e., they are removed from the source string).
• If XYZ contains more characters than abc, the extra characters are ignored.
• If a character appears multiple times in abc, then the first occurrence determines the replacement character.

translate() is a character-by-character substitution function, not a regexp or string replacement function. The abc and XYZ strings represent character ciphers, not substrings. This means that if you run into any of the cases above, you may be using the method incorrectly (except perhaps having a longer abc to remove certain characters).

A substitution like this will not output The quick red fox as you might expect; instead the result is The quick red fdx.

<xsl:value-of select="translate('The quick brown fox', 'brown', 'red')" />

XPath notes that the translate function is not a sufficient solution for case conversion in all languages. A future version of XPath may provide additional functions for case conversion.

However, this is the closest we have at present to a function that can convert a string to uppercase or lowercase.

<xsl:value-of select="translate('The quick brown fox.', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')" />

Output

THE QUICK BROWN FOX.

XPath 1.0 4.2

Supported.