Strings Comparison Question.

Sorry if you get duplicates but I got some email transmission error so I am
gonna post this problem one more time and see if someone can help me.


I am new to XSL and I have several questions - some of them might be really
easy ones but I just want to confirm.

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?


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.

How would I go about doing this?  And the those non-alphabetic characters
are not fixed, they could vary depending on the XML file used.  If there was
string comparison allowed then I could do something like @name<'a' or
@name>'z'  for each node and that would give me all non-alphabetic
characters.

Any ideas/help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks


<record>
        <community name="101 South">
                ... Some Information ...
        </community>
        <community name="**">
                ... Some Information ...
        </community>
        <community name="Adams">
                ... Some Information ...
        </community>
        <community name="Smith">
                ... Some Information ...
        </community>
        ... .... ....
</record>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
version="1.1" xmlns:lxslt="http://xml.apache.org/xslt";>

      <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:apply-templates match="//community"/>
      </xsl:template>

        <xsl:template name="community">
                <xsl:if test="starts-with(@name,'*')">
                        <xsl:call-template
name="createTopLetterLinkForCommunity">
                                <xsl:with-param
name="letterLink">*</xsl:with-param>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:if>
                <xsl:if test="starts-with(@name,'A')">
                        <xsl:call-template
name="createTopLetterLinkForCommunity">
                                <xsl:with-param
name="letterLink">A</xsl:with-param>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:if>
                <xsl:if test="starts-with(@name,'B')">
                        <xsl:call-template
name="createTopLetterLinkForCommunity">
                                <xsl:with-param
name="letterLink">B</xsl:with-param>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:if>
                <xsl:if test="starts-with(@name,'C')">
                        <xsl:call-template
name="createTopLetterLinkForCommunity">
                                <xsl:with-param
name="letterLink">C</xsl:with-param>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:if>
                <xsl:if test="starts-with(@name,'D')">
                        <xsl:call-template
name="createTopLetterLinkForCommunity">
                                <xsl:with-param
name="letterLink">D</xsl:with-param>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:if>
              .... AND SO ON ....
        </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>




Thanks
V. Patel.


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