xslt-lab/site/content/xslt/functions/xpath-substring-after.md

title, description, date, version, versionLabel, category, syntax, tags

title	description	date	version	versionLabel	category	syntax	tags
substring-after()	Returns the part of a string that appears after the first occurrence of a given separator substring.	2026-04-18T00:00:00Z	1.0	XSLT 1.0	string function	substring-after(string, separator)	xslt reference xpath xslt1

Description

substring-after() finds the first occurrence of separator in string and returns everything that follows it. If separator is not found, the function returns the empty string "". If separator is the empty string, the function returns the entire string.

Both arguments are converted to strings before processing. The search is case-sensitive.

substring-after() is the complement of substring-before() and together they provide the XPath 1.0 way to split a delimited string: extract the domain from an email address, the value from a key=value pair, or the path from a scheme://authority/path URI.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
string	xs:string	Yes	The string to search within.
separator	xs:string	Yes	The delimiter to search for.

Return value

xs:string — the portion of string after the first occurrence of separator, or "" if not found.

Examples

Extract the domain from an email address

Input XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<users>
  <user email="alice@example.com"/>
  <user email="bob@company.org"/>
</users>

Stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/users">
    <domains>
      <xsl:for-each select="user">
        <domain><xsl:value-of select="substring-after(@email, '@')"/></domain>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </domains>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Output:

<domains>
  <domain>example.com</domain>
  <domain>company.org</domain>
</domains>

Extract a path segment after a known prefix

Input XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urls>
  <url>https://api.example.com/v1/users</url>
  <url>https://api.example.com/v1/products</url>
</urls>

Stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/urls">
    <paths>
      <xsl:for-each select="url">
        <path>
          <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(., 'https://api.example.com')"/>
        </path>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </paths>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Output:

<paths>
  <path>/v1/users</path>
  <path>/v1/products</path>
</paths>

Notes

• If separator is not found in string, the result is "" — not the original string. Use contains() first if you need to handle the not-found case differently.
• Only the first occurrence of separator is used. To extract the portion after the last occurrence, nest substring-after() calls or use a recursive named template in XSLT 1.0.
• substring-after($s, '') returns the full string $s (the empty string is found at position zero, so everything after it is the whole input).
• In XSLT 2.0+, tokenize() splits a string into a sequence and is generally more convenient for repeated splitting.

See also

• substring-before()
• starts-with()
• contains()
• substring()