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lang() function
Apache Foundation Xalan Project Xerces Project Web Consortium Oasis Open

lang() function

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Functionality

The xml:lang can be used to determine the language for a node or a node-set. The attribute can be used to store language-specific data in an XML document:

    <phrases>
      <greeting xml:lang="en">Hello!</greeting>
      <greeting xml:lang="no">Hei!</greeting>
      <greeting xml:lang="fr">Salut!</greeting>
      <greeting xml:lang="es">Hola!</greeting>
      <greeting xml:lang="de">Sweinhund!</greeting>
    </phrases>

The XSL stylesheet can use the lang() function to select the element with the desired language:

    <xsl:template match="greeting">
      <xsl:if test="lang("de")>
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
        <xsl:text> Grossglucklicher wunche!</xsl:text>
      </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>
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Implementation

The DOM interface has been given a method that returns the language for a given node. The language is returned as a string (on whatever format is used in the XML document - should be iso), and may be null if no language is defined.

    public String DOM.getLanguage(int node);

The BasisLibrary class has a static method that will compare the language of the context node with some other language and return the result as a boolean.

    public static boolean BasisLibrary.testLanguage(String language, DOM dom, int node);

The compiled code for the lang() method calls this method in the BasisLibrary and leaves the result on the stack for the calling element.

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