Format Date of XML Attribute Value Using XSLT

Question

I'm running into an issue with an XSLT Transformation I'm trying to do. In the overall project, I'm working to convert an XML document to a CSV file for a database upload. The problem is the XML sends dates as an attribute value in ISO8601 format (YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00), but for the database to take it from the CSV file, I need to convert it to MM/DD/YYYY.

Here's an XML Sample:

<GetChanged>
  <UserInformation>
   <Column Name="id" Value="555555555"/>
   <Column Name="name" Value="Kevin"/>
   <Column Name="bday" Value="1990-01-01T00:00:00"/>
  </UserInformation>
 </GetChanged>

Here's the XSLT I'm trying to use:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
xmlns:csv="csv:csv">

<xsl:output method="text"/>

<xsl:template match="GetChanged">
<!-- header -->
    <xsl:text>"id","name","bday"&#10;</xsl:text>
<!-- data rows -->
<xsl:for-each select="UserInformation">

    <!-- data cells -->
    <xsl:for-each select="Column[@Name='id']">
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="@Value"/>
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
    <xsl:for-each select="Column[@Name='name']">
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="@Value"/>
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
    <xsl:for-each select="Column[@Name='bday']">
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="format-date(@Value, '[M01]/[D01]/[Y0001]')"/>
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>
           <xsl:if test="position()!=last()">
            <xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
            </xsl:if>
        <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

However, when I run this through Ruby using Nokogiri, I end up getting an error:

RuntimeError: runtime error: element value-of XPath evaluation returned no result

Thoughts on what I can do to format this date appropriately?

Thanks in advance!

Pascal Pascal · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-13T19:43:24

nokogiri depends on libxslt for XSLT.

In Nokogiri 1.6.0 and later libxml2 and libxslt are bundled with the gem, but if you want to use the system versions:

(see here for more details: https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri)

libxslt only supports XSLT-1.0

A separate library called libxslt is available implementing XSLT-1.0 for libxml2

(Details see here: http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT.html)

You could work around that by using a solution like this: Convert date from DD-MMM-YYYY to YYYYMMDD format in xslt 1.0

or do some substring/concat like described here: Displaying Date as DD-MM-YYYY within XSLT/XML

Format Date of XML Attribute Value Using XSLT

2 Answers