String manipulation is one of the most common tasks in XSLT. Whether you are formatting output, parsing codes, or normalising values from external systems, XPath provides a rich set of string functions. This reference covers the most useful ones with examples you can run in XSLT Playground .

Basic string functions (XSLT 1.0+)

string-length

Returns the number of characters in a string.

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substring

Extracts a portion of a string. Arguments: string, start position (1-based), optional length.

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substring-before and substring-after

Split a string on a delimiter.

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contains, starts-with, ends-with

Test membership without extracting.

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concat

Joins strings together.…