XSL "Is Numeric" too

February 27, 2008 1-minute read

xml • xslt

Building on a previous post Oracle “Is Numeric” a similar thing is possible using XSLT (or more accurately, XPATH) too…

<xsl:if test="string-length(translate(node(),' +-.1234567890', ' ')) > 0"> 
  <xsl:text>not numeric</xsl:text> 
</xsl:if>

Not exactly ground breaking stuff, but something similar did turn out useful for extracting the non numerical area component of a post code (i.e. the SO bit of SO53 3RY).

substring-before(translate($postcode,'1234567890', '----------'),'-')

Which I thought was close enough to the oracle is numeric implementation to make comment.