There's no sorting capability in XPath, sadly. You can do it in XSLT using
xsl:perform-sort, but it's still more lines of code than I would like,
unfortunately! 

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 13 July 2007 18:48
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  Sorting distinct values
> 
> Hey,
> 
> Is there a way I overlooked in XPath to sort a sequence of numbers?
> 
> I'm pondering how to pull distinct values from a list, say
> (0,3,17,4,6,4,3) and get them in sorted order. 
> distinct-values() in Saxon returns me (0,3,17,4,6) but I'd 
> like them as (0,3,4,6,17).
> 
> I did manage to do it in XSLT by grouping them by value, 
> sorting the groups, writing out the grouping keys and then 
> tokenizing the resulting string -- but that seems like a long 
> way to do it.
> 
> Any ideas for a spiffy short way?
> 
> Cheers,
> Wendell
> 
> 
> 
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