Today I did a little bit of XSLT coding and stumbled over the problem to convert ISO 8601 date strings into a more human readable format.

Specifically I wanted to turn a date of the form 2008-04-10T16:12:27Z to the typical german format of 10.04.2008 16:12:27 and spit the whole thing out as HTML to display it on a webpage.
After a bit of time I came up with the following XSLT (sanitized):

	
	
		
		
			
				
				
			
			dtstart
			
				
			
		
		
	
	
	
	
			
	
	
			
	  
	
			
	
	
			
	
	
			
	
	
			
	
	
			
	
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
	

Using this example and the mighty power of substring() it should be pretty easy to convert any date format into an other one.