Read XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition Online
Authors: Michael Kay
XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (564 page)
in French), and the choice of words or abbreviations equivalent to the English
p.m.
andA.D..
Since the variety of calendars and numbering schemes that implementations might support is completely open ended, it's quite possible that the
language
attribute might be used in other ways than these, for example to decide betweenIVandIIIIas the representation of the number 4 in Roman numerals.
Implementations are not required to support any particular languages, and the set of languages that are supported is likely to depend on the choice of calendar.
The Calendar Argument
The World Wide Web Consortium takes its name very seriously, and bends over backward to ensure that it caters to every society on the planet. While most of the Western world, and much of the Eastern world, now uses the Gregorian calendar first introduced in the sixteenth century, there are many other calendars still in use. The XSLT specification defines the following codes that you can use to represent different calendars.
| Code | Calendar |
| AD | Anno Domini (Christian Era) |
| AH | Anno Hegirae (Muhammedan Era) |
| AME | Mauludi Era (solar years since Mohammed's birth) |
| AM | Anno Mundi (Jewish Calendar) |
| AP | Anno Persici |
| AS | Aji Saka Era (Java) |
| BE | Buddhist Era |
| CB | Cooch Behar Era |
| CE | Common Era |
| CL | Chinese Lunar Era |
| CS | Chula Sakarat Era |
| EE | Ethiopian Era |
| FE | Fasli Era |
| ISO | ISO 8601 calendar |
| JE | Japanese Calendar |
| KE | Khalsa Era (Sikh calendar) |
| KY | Kali Yuga |
| ME | Malabar Era |
| MS | Monarchic Solar Era |
| NS | Nepal Samwat Era |
| OS | Old Style (Julian Calendar) |
| RS | Rattanakosin (Bangkok) Era |
| SE | Saka Era |
| SH | Mohammedan Solar Era (Iran) |
| SS | Saka Samvat |
| TE | Tripurabda Era |
| VE | Vikrama Era |
| VS | Vikrama Samvat Era |
This looks like a pretty impressive list, but before you get too excited that your favorite calendar is in the list, you should be aware that there is no requirement for implementations to support all these. And even if a calendar is supported, there are snags that you need to be aware of.
The date-formatting functions assume that the date and/or time will be represented using the types defined in XML Schema, which are based on the ISO 8601 specification. This doesn't mean that you have to be using a schema to take advantage of them, because you can always construct an instance of one of these types using a call to a constructor function; for example,xs:date(“1999-11-16”). It does mean, however, that you have to ensure that your dates and times are in ISO format before you can use these functions. If your XML documents contain dates in nonstandard formats such as16 NOV 99or11/16/1999, then you are going to have to convert them first to the ISO format. And the same is true if your dates are in a different calendar.
