Attila Zobolyak
Attila Zobolyak

Reputation: 749

How to get only numbers from string with XPath

I have a string which contains numbers. Is it feasible only with XPath that I get only numbers from it?

For example: myString="abcd12ef34gh567", result: 1234567

Upvotes: 13

Views: 13684

Answers (2)

Dimitre Novatchev
Dimitre Novatchev

Reputation: 243579

Use:

translate(., translate(.,'0123456789',''), '')

This is the so called "double-translate" method, first proposed by @Michael Kay and can be used both in XPath 1.0 and in XPath 2.0.

Of course, in XPath 2.0 using RegeX will generally be more efficient:

replace('abc123def590xyz', '[^\d]', '')

Upvotes: 17

James Sulak
James Sulak

Reputation: 32447

If you can guarantee that the non-digit characters will be only lower-case letters (like in your example), you could do the following in XPath 1:

translate($myString, 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', '')

You can add other characters to the alphabet string as necessary.

In XPath 2, you could use a regex:

replace($myString, '[^0-9]', '')

Upvotes: 2

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