Date and Time

Daniel Bibbens

I have modified the output of the URL 'http://xobjex.com/cgi-bin/date.pl' to produce timezones (local, and utc), a XML Schema friendly stamp, and component data for each date. Like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<date>
  <local tz="PDT" stamp="2004-08-20T17:40:47">
    <year>2004</year>
    <month>08</month>
    <day>20</day>
    <hour>17</hour>
    <minute>40</minute>
    <second>47</second>
  </local>
  <utc tz="GMT" stamp="2004-08-21T00:40:47">
    <year>2004</year>
    <month>08</month>
    <day>21</day>
    <hour>00</hour>
    <minute>40</minute>
    <second>47</second>
  </utc>
</date>

So you'll want to use it in a manner similar to these examples:

<xsl:variable
 name="date" 
 select="document('http://xobjex.com/cgi-bin/date.pl)/date"/>

<xsl:variable
 name="stamp"
 select="$date/utc/@stamp"/>

<!-- produces: On the third stroke it will be 2004-08-21T00:40:47 --> <h1>
  On the third stroke it will be
  <xsl:value-of select="$stamp"/>
</h1>

<!-- produces: In Santa Monica, California, the sun set 
     at 7:34 PM PDT today. -->
<p>
  <xsl:text>In Santa Monica, California, the sun set at 7:34 PM </xsl:text>
  <xsl:value-of select="$date/local/@tz"/>
  <xsl:text> today.</xsl:text>
</p>

<!-- produces: The date in London is 21-08-2004. --> <p>
  <xsl:text>The date in London is </xsl:text>
  <xsl:value-of select="concat(
		$date/utc/day, '-', 
		$date/utc/month, '-', 
		$date/utc/year
		)"/>
  <xsl:text>.</xsl:text>
</p>

<!-- produces: The date in Santa Monica is 20-08-2004. --> <p>
  <xsl:text>The date in London is </xsl:text>
  <xsl:value-of select="concat(
		$date/local/day, '-', 
		$date/local/month, '-', 
		$date/local/year
		)"/>
  <xsl:text>.</xsl:text>
</p>

Joerg Pietschmann

There is currently no way to do this from within an XSL sheet. I use external tools to write the desired information into a XML file and get the value into the XSL sheet by using document():

Command line frame (requires Unix toolset, Korn shell or bash):

cat >time.xml <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<time>$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")</time>
EOF
saxon -o $3 $1 $2

XSL snippet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:variable name="time" select="document('time.xml')/time"/>
...

This reads a nicely formatted timestamp into the $time variable. If you need year, month, day etc. separately, you could structure the time.xml file:

cat >time.xml <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<time>
  <year>$(date "+%Y")</year>
  <month>$(date "+%m")</month>
   ...
</time>
EOF

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:variable name="time" select="document('time.xml')/time"/>

  ... 
    <my-year><xsl:value-of select="$time/year"/></my-year>
  ...

Of course, if you work on Windows, creating time.xml may be a greater challenge. I installed an Unix toolset on my windows machine (the example above was developed on windows!). There are several, you might want to check out the free CYGWIN toolkit at http://www.cygwin.org . Alternatively, you can use WSH, Visual Basic, Perl or write a java program.

???