DevBlog: Daniel

I'm writing some XSLT that is supposed to generate a text file. I thought I needed to pad the fields with spaces to get them to the right width, but actually I don't, it is delimited text not fixed width.

Thought I better post this somewhere I can find it again if I need to :)

<!-- this is the function for making a field the right width --> <xsl:template name="leftjustify"> <xsl:param name="content"> <xsl:param name="width"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="string-length($content) &gt; $width"> <xsl:value-of select="substring($content,1,$width)"> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:value-of select="$content"> <xsl:call-template name="spaces"> <xsl:with-param name="length"><xsl:value-of select="$width - string-length($content)"></xsl:with-param> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> <xsl:template name="spaces"> <xsl:param name="length"> <!-- the value of this next variable is 255 spaces.. --> <xsl:variable name="longstringofspaces"><xsl:text> </xsl:text></xsl:variable> <xsl:value-of select="substring($longstringofspaces,1,$length)"> </xsl:template>

There's two named templates (read, functions), "spaces" that returns a specified number of spaces (up to 255), and one that uses spaces to do truncation or left-justification. Call it like this:

<xsl:call-template name="leftjustify"> <xsl:with-param name="content">this is too short</xsl:with-param> <xsl:with-param name="width">40</xsl:with-param> </xsl:call-template>

and the result will be the text "this is too short" with 23 spaces after it (making it 40 chars long).