right-pad values with XSLT

In this post an XSLT function that can be used to right-pad the value of an element with a chosen character to a certain length. No rocket science but this might become handy again so by putting it down here I don’t have to reinvent it later. The function itself looks like:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"  xmlns:functx="http://my/functions"
                xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

    <xsl:function name="functx:pad-string-to-length" as="xsd:string">
    <xsl:param name="stringToPad" as="xsd:string?"/>
    <xsl:param name="padChar" as="xsd:string"/>
    <xsl:param name="length" as="xsd:integer"/>
    <xsl:sequence select="
   substring(
     string-join (
       ($stringToPad, for $i in (1 to $length) return $padChar)
       ,'')
    ,1,$length)
"/>
    </xsl:function>

</xsl:stylesheet>
 

And with this function available you can use it like:

 
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:value-of select="functx:pad-string-to-length(//short_value, '0', 12)" />
    </xsl:template>
 

The input XML like

 
<test>
  <short_value>123</short_value>
</test>

will give as a result in this case:
123000000000
By the way, this function only works with XSLT2!