Saxon Documentation

Full Contents

About Saxon

Changes in this Release

Licensing

Using XSLT 2.0

Using XQuery

Handling Source Documents

XML Schema Processing

XPath API for Java

Saxon on .NET

Extensibility

Saxon Extensions

Sample Saxon Applications

The Saxon SQL Extension

XSLT Elements

XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax

Function Library

Standards Conformance

xslt:format-date

xslt:format-date(xs:date value, string picture) → string

Function signature

$value	xs:date ?
$picture	xs:string
Result	xs:string

Formats a date, using a format controlled by the picture string. The result is equivalent to the 5-argument form of the function, with the third, fourth, and fifth arguments set to an empty sequence.

XSLT 2.0 Specification

xslt:format-date(xs:date value, string picture, string language) → string

Function signature

$value	xs:date ?
$picture	xs:string
$language	xs:string ?
$calendar	xs:string ?
$country	xs:string ?
Result	xs:string

XSLT 2.0 Specification

Formats a date, using a format controlled by the picture string. If no language is specified, the value is taken from the current Java locale. If the language (explicitly supplied or defaulted) is other than "en", the system tries to locate a class named net.sf.saxon.number.Numberer_XX where XX is the language; this class must provide methods to perform the localization.

If a calendar other than AD or ISO is specified, the result is prefixed "[Calendar: AD]" and is otherwise output as if the default calendar were used.

The country argument is currently used only when the format requests output of timezones by name (using [ZN]): for example with language="en", country="gb" and a date that falls in British Summer Time, +01:00 is output as "BST". This is problematic, because the information is not really available: the data type maintains only a time zone offset, and different countries (time zones) use different names for the same offset, at different times of year. If the value is a date or dateTime, and if the country argument is supplied, Saxon uses the Java database of time zones and daylight savings time (summer time) changeover dates to work out the most likely timezone applicable to the date in question.

If the timezone is formatted as [ZN,6] (specifically, with a minumum length of 6 or more) then the Olsen timezone name is output (again, this requires the country to be supplied). The Olsen timezone name generally takes the form Continent/City, for example "Europe/London" or "America/Los_Angeles". If the date/time is in daylight savings time for that timezone, an asterisk is appended to the Olsen timezone name.