> I've successfully used the expression <xsl:for-each
> select="fieldcount[position() &lt; $lastNo]"> to perform a 
> certain operation a number of times.  I'm not sure where I 
> got it and can't find information on why it works.  Now I'm 
> doing a slightly different stylesheet and I can't get the 
> desired result.  Could someone explain how this operation works.

Colin has explained how it works.

In XSLT 2.0 you can do <xsl:for-each select="1 to $N">.

In XSLT 1.0 the purist solution is a recursive template to which you pass a
parameter N indicating the number of iterations required; it does the work
once, then if N>1 it calls itself, passing the value N-1 as the number of
iterations remaining. But the dirty hack of iterating over a
sufficiently-large node-set is often preferable, because you don't risk
running out of stack space.

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