# 22. Virtuoso Functions Guide - substring-before

Chapter Contents | Prev | Next
Keyword Search:
www.openlinksw.com
docs.openlinksw.com
Book Home
Contents
Preface
Virtuoso Functions Guide
Administration
Aggregate Functions
Array Manipulation
BPEL APIs
Backup
Compression
Cursor
Date & Time Manipulation
Debug
Dictionary Manipulation
Encoding & Decoding
File Manipulation
Free Text
Hashing / Cryptographic
LDAP
Locale
Mail
Miscellaneous
Number
Remote SQL Data Source
Replication
SOAP
SQL
String
Transaction
Type Mapping
UDDI
User Defined Types & The CLR
Virtuoso Java PL API
Virtuoso Server Extension Interface (VSEI)
Web Server & Internet
XML
XPATH & XQUERY
and
append
assign
avg
boolean
ceiling
concat
contains
count
create-attribute
create-comment
create-element
create-pi
current
distinct
doc
document
document-literal
empty
ends-with
every
except
false
filter
floor
fn:collection
for
format-number
function-available
generate-id
id
if
intersect
is_after()
is_before()
key
lang
last
let
list()
local-name
max
min
name
namespace-uri
normalize-space
not
number
or
position
processxquery
processxslt
processxsql
progn()
replace()
round
serialize
shallow
some
starts-with
string
string-length
substring
substring-after
substring-before
sum
system-property
text_contains()
translate
true
tuple()
union
unordered
unparsed-entity-uri
urlify
xmlview
Functions Index

## substring-before

Returns the substring of the first argument string that precedes the first occurrence of the second argument string in the first argument string.
string substring-before ( source_strg string, sub_strg string);
Description

If the source_strg does not contain sub_strg, the function returns the empty string. Otherwise, it finds the first occurence of sub_strg and returns the pert of source_strg that precedes the occurence. If any argument is not a string, it is converted to string using rules for string() XPATH function.

Parameters
source_strg – String where the search is performed
sub_strg – String to search
Return Types

String

Examples

Extract year ("1999" substring) from ISO date string

    substring-before('1999-12-31','-')

See Also

string() substring() substring-after()