> 
> 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.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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