My problem is simple: in my XML data, a timestamp is provided as a long integer (number of milliseconds since the "the epoch"). When I do XSLT, I want to display it as a readable string, such as "Mon Nov 01 18:08:48 CDT 2010". After hours of struggle, I found: It's not so easy to get the job done with JDK 1.6 There are tons of garbage on the web in this space (suggestions, code snippets that simply don't work) Simple Xalan extension functions was the only resource that's somewhat informative. Even there some of the examples don't work. Below is a list of what worked and what didn't. This works: <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="h... This does not (providing long value to Date constructor): <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="h......

The String.format() method provides versatile formatting capabilities. This tutorial tries to present these capabilities in a accessible manner. The format string A format string can contain zero, one, or more format specifiers . The general form of a format specifier is: %[argument_index$] [flags] [width] [.precision]co... where things in square brackets are optional, and conversion is a character indicating the conversion to be applied to the corresponding variable value. The only required characters in the format specifier is the percent sign % and the conversion character. A simple example: public static void simpleFormat() { System.out... The Argument index The argument index is specified by a number, terminated by the dollar sign $ . The same argument may be repeated multiple times in a format string. Unindexed...

Method 1 - use javap with verbose flag: $ javap HelloWorld -verbose | head Compiled fro... Method 2 - use a utility class: import java.io.*; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; ... According to the VM Spec , a Java class file has this structure: ClassFile { u4 magic; ...

This one is even more weird: it worked on Windows but failed on Linux, using default tools JDK1.6.0_20 on both. The exception thrown was: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid conversion fro... And the stack trace: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid conversion fro... This was the XSL used: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xs... The problem was , DateUtil.java had two getDate methods, one taking long parameter, the other taking a String parameter. And Java's XSLT get confused about which one to use: import java.util.Date; import java.text.SimpleD...

Following are some bugs in the Xalan jar shipped with JBoss 5.1.0 GA and JBoss 6.0. The Xalan jar file is located in jboss-5.1.0.GA/lib/endorsed ( %JBOSS_HOME%/common/lib for JBoss 6.0). Test xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> ... Test xsl: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xs... XSLT Java code: import org.w3c.dom.*; import javax.xml.parsers.... DateUtil.java import java.util.Date; public class DateUti... XSLT output: Transformer Factory class: class org.apache.xalan.... Apparently, the output is wrong. The string "A test event" should not have been displayed.

XSLT by default writes namespace declarations in the output. Most of the time it's spurious, sometimes outright wrong. Take this XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <ev... And this XSL: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xs... where DateUtil.java is: import java.util.Date; public class DateUti... The output is (with JDK1.6): Title: <br xmlns:java="http://xml.apache.org/x... The namespace declaration went to the <br> element, not the timestamp where it belongs. To remove the namespace info, add exclude-result-prefixes to the XSL: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xs...