> 
> Is it just me, or would it be generally useful for XSL to provide a
> substring() function with a numerical second argument?  
> Reducing a first name to an initial is one obvious application;

We had this conversation a few weeks ago (regarding length()). As I learnt
then, it's all due to the appalling decision to allow non-spacing
diactricals in Unicode, which makes it quite hard to define what you mean by
"the first character" in a string.

Mike Kay


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