Re: [xsl] Number formating (format-number) and string to number function problem.

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

XML is (essentially) an untyped format of marked up character strings,
so there is no concept in XML itself of a "number" or a "string".

so when you say

>  but that function would convert the result to string instead of a number,
> so when I use

you are confusng yourself. In the output there are no numbers or strings
just character data, and the question is, do you want to generate
<Data ss:Type="Number">1,234.57</data>
or
<Data ss:Type="Number">1234.57</data>
I expect that you want the latter, in which case you just need value-of
and no format-number.

> I also tried to use "number()" function as shown below, but it's very
> strange that the result would be "NaN" for most values.

you can not have commas in numeric literals in XPath you can't go
1,234+1 to get 1,235
and for the same reason number("1,234") is NaN.
I don't know wnything about excel but I expect that what you want to do
is have the cells entered as <Data ss:Type="Number">1234.57</data>
and just set up a style rule in excel that says when printing to format
the numbers with a comma.

If in doubt start up a spreadsheet in excel by hand that has numbers
formatted as you want, save as xml and then just look at the generated
xml and get xslt to generate that.

David