>     Christian> If that is possible without having to resort to a
>     Christian> custom extension function as Michael Kay suggested
>     Christian> earlier, I'd really love to see that.
> 
> I'm sure it is.


I tend to turn to XSLT and XPath as my first choice of programming language
for a great many tasks; but not for the fiddly bit-twiddling needed to do
UTF-8 encoding and decoding. But it can be done, of course.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/