
XSLT is a language for manipulating XML documents, and XML documents are text. When you're manipulating text, functions for searching strings and pulling out substrings are indispensable for rearranging documents to create new documents. The XPath string functions incorporated by XSLT give you a lot of power when you're manipulating element character data, attribute values, and any other strings of text that your stylesheet can access. We'll start by looking at ways to use these functions to split up strings and how a PCDATA element might be split into subelements.
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