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XPath function

translate()

Character-by-character replacement, and the only way to fold case in XPath 1.0 — because lower-case() is 2.0.

translate(s, from, to) replaces each character of s that appears in `from` with the character at the same position in `to`. Characters in `from` with no counterpart in `to` are deleted, which makes it a way to strip characters as well as substitute them.

Its most common use is case-insensitive matching, since XPath 1.0 has neither lower-case() nor upper-case(). The idiom is verbose and unavoidable.

Syntax
translate(string, from, to) → string
Returns
string
Kind
Function
Version
XPath 1.0 (libxml2)

Worked examples

Each result below is what the evaluator returned, asserted on every test run. An empty result means an empty node-set — which is an answer, not an error.

  • translate('WIDGET-1', 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')on order.xmlRun
    widget-1
  • translate('2026-01-01', '-', '')on order.xmlRun
    20260101

    An empty `to` deletes the characters instead of replacing them.

  • count(//line[contains(translate(@sku, 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'), 'widget')])on order.xmlRun
    2

    Case-insensitive contains(), the long way round.

Run your own expression

What catches people out

  • It is per character, not per substring — translate('abc', 'ab', 'x') does not replace 'ab' with 'x'.
  • A shorter `to` deletes the surplus characters rather than leaving them alone. That is a feature, and a trap.
  • It only handles the characters you list. Accented letters need to be in the mapping explicitly.

The sample documents

Every example on this page runs against this document. The sitemap one is namespaced on purpose — almost every real XML document is, and that changes which expressions match.

order.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<order id="A-1001" tier="gold">
  <customer country="NO">Ada Lovelace</customer>
  <lines>
    <line sku="WIDGET-1" qty="2"><price>14.50</price></line>
    <line sku="WIDGET-2" qty="1"><price>39.00</price></line>
    <line sku="GIFT-WRAP" qty="1"><price>0.00</price></line>
  </lines>
  <note>  Deliver after 09:00  </note>
</order>

Related

All 34 XPath entries

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