.. _substring-before:

================
substring-before
================ 

The substring before the first occurrence of a delimiter

Description
~~~~~~~~~~~
The fn:substring-before function extracts all the characters of a string ($arg1) 
that appear before the first occurrence of another specified string ($arg2).

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   :widths: 40 60
   :header-rows: 1

   * - **Parameters**
     - **Description**
   * - arg1:string()
     - the entire string
   * - arg2:string()
     - the string that ends the substring
   * - collation:string()
     - the collation to use to compare strings

Examples
~~~~~~~~
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   :widths: 50 50
   :header-rows: 1

   * - **XPath**
     - **Results**
   * - substring-before('query', 'r')
     - que
   * - substring-before('query', 'ery')
     - qu
   * - substring-before('queryquery', 'ery')
     - qu
   * - substring-before('query', 'query')
     - zero-length string
   * - substring-before('query', 'x')
     - zero-length string
   * - substring-before('query', '')
     - zero-length string
   * - substring-before('query', ())
     - zero-length string

See Also
~~~~~~~~

.. toctree::
   :titlesonly:
   :glob:

* :ref:`functx_substring-before-last`.
* :ref:`functx_substring-before-if-contains`.
* :ref:`substring`.
* :ref:`substring-after`.