Kaine,
Just to reiterate something important: there is a lot to be said
for avoiding VBScript or java extension functions if at all possible.
After all, part of the reason for using XML, XPath and XSLT is to have a
cross-platform, portable, easy-to-integrate way of doing integration. If
your XML app still requires several different language runtimes,
including custom VBSCript, some might say that you could've used VB for
the whole app. You would be missing out on the ability to seamlessly
move your XML processing between different platforms, servers and into
network hardware.
For that reason, using often-inconvenient string-parsing
primitives or the increasingly-accepted "exslt" extensions is better
than writing your own extension functions. Date formatting is one of the
top complaints against XSLT 1.0, so there's a broad set of common
approaches for dealing with it: XSLT 2.0, exslt, common templates, etc.
Even if it seems a little more painful, a little investment in
portability today will pay off in a big way later.
Regards,
\\ Eugene Kuznetsov
\\ eugene(_at_)datapower(_dot_)com - XML-aware network infrastructure
\\ DataPower Technology, Inc. - secure SOAP, speed up XPath
\\ http://www.datapower.com - XS40 XML Security Gateway
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