{"id":184,"date":"2007-10-01T20:29:56","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T03:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/2007\/10\/01\/simple-parsing-of-space-seprated-attributes-in-xpathxslt\/"},"modified":"2007-10-01T20:29:56","modified_gmt":"2007-10-02T03:29:56","slug":"simple-parsing-of-space-seprated-attributes-in-xpathxslt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dubinko.info\/blog\/2007\/10\/simple-parsing-of-space-seprated-attributes-in-xpathxslt\/","title":{"rendered":"simple parsing of space-seprated attributes in XPath\/XSLT"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath\/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “.<\/p>\n

The proper way is to look at individual tokens in the attribute value. On first glance, this might require a call to EXSLT or some complex tokenization routine, but there’s a simpler way. I first discovered this on the microformats wiki<\/a>, and only cleaned up the technique a tiny bit.<\/p>\n

The solution involves three XPath 1.0 functions, contains(), concat() to join together string fragments, and normalize-space() to strip off leading and trailing spaces and convert any other sequences of whitespace into a single space.<\/p>\n

In english, you<\/p>\n