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Summary
This snippet shows how to pad a given
string with spaces to a given fixed
length. Two non-recursive templates
are presented. Demonstrated is how to
specify white-space only nodes within
a variable's contents.
This is a repeated FAQ:
"I have a string, which I need to pad with spaces so that the result will occupy exactly 10 characters. Can this be done with XSLT?"
The answer is an "yes" as demonstrated by the code below.
While a general recursive approach for iterating N times and outputting a space on each iteration, here we present another, non-recursive approach.
The idea is that if we know in advance the maximum length to which strings will have to be padded, then we could declare an xsl:variable holding a string of spaces with at least this maximum length.
The rest is just some simple calculation of lengths and using the substring function.
The code below performs right-padding a string. A very small modification is needed so that left-padding will be performed just change:
substring(concat($String,$spaces),1,$length)
to
concat(substring($spaces, 1, $length - string-length($String)), $String)
Another thing to note is the xml:space="preserve" in one of the definitions of the "spaces" variable.
Why is this necessary? As we know, the msxml3 parser discards on default all whitespace-only nodes. Without specifying the "preserve" value for the xml:space attribute, it would not be possible to specify the necessary number of spaces as a single text node within the contents of the variable.
ANother thing to note is that if we intend to present the resulting padded string by a browser, we need to enclose it with (or , or ) tags, or translate all spaces to
so that the browser will not ignore the spaces.
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