> > In my case the second instance doc is already 'in memory' (having been
> > retrieved from a database) so I really just want to pass the XML
> > itself as a string.
> >
> > Does anyone know whether this is possible using XSLT, or will I need
> > to look at a programmatic (ie. Java) implementation alternative :-(
>
> It is definitely possible.  You could e.g. pass the XML-document as a
> string through the parameter interface.  I do this frequently with
> xalanc.

Don't you need an extension function to do that?  eg the Xalan
equivalent of saxon:parse()

It's certainly the easiest way to solve this problem if portability
isn't an issue.  It would've be great if 2.0 had an inbuilt way of
accepting XML as string in a param...