XSL Template to count substrings

Published: Wednesday, 25 February 2004

Here is a template that can be used to count the number of substrings within a particular string. It takes two parameters.

string: which is the large string we are search through
substr: which is the substring we are searching for

<xsl:template name="substring-count">
  <xsl:param name="string"/>
  <xsl:param name="substr"/>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="contains($string, $substr) and $string and $substr">
      <xsl:variable name="rest">
        <xsl:call-template name="substring-count">
          <xsl:with-param name="string" select="substring-after($string, $substr)"/>
          <xsl:with-param name="substr" select="$substr"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:variable>
      <xsl:value-of select="$rest + 1"/>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>0</xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

To use this template, use the call-template element:

<xsl:call-template name="substring-count">
  <xsl:with-param name="string" select="'mary had a little lamb'" />
  <xsl:with-param name="substr" select="'lamb'" />
</xsl:call-templat>