1. Is it possible to compare two strings lexicographically in
XSL/XPATH? I believe the answer is no. Is there a way I can
achieve this?
Not directly (in XSLT 1.0), but you can do it with the node-set
extension. Write the two strings as nodes in a tree, sort the nodes, and
see which one comes first in the result.
2. I have listed the XML & XSL below. In that the community
name attribute
could start with a alphabet, a number or any other character.
Most of the
community names are expected to start with alphabets. In my
output, if I have one or more community name starting with a
certain alphabet (i.e. 'A') then I want to put a link (aka
advance orgranizer) at the top of the page that would say 'A'
and likewise for all the alphabets. Also since I have few
communities starting with non-alphabets, I would want to put
a link called Miscellaneous that would link to a page which
would display all non-alphabetic characters.
This is a kind of grouping problem: you want to form groups of items
that start with the same letter. Use Muenchian grouping, with a key
defined as
<xsl:key name="g" match="name" use="substring(.,1,1)"/>
Read about Muenchian grouping at
http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/grouping
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael(_dot_)H(_dot_)Kay(_at_)ntlworld(_dot_)com
work: Michael(_dot_)Kay(_at_)softwareag(_dot_)com
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