> (personally I think it should do the
> same in comment nodes - not sure why it was decided not to),

It is not possible in XML to represent a character that is not in the
specified encoding if that character is in a comment.

<foo>&#1234;</foo>
foo contains a single character
<!--&#1234;-->
the comment contains the 7 characters & # 1 2 3 4 ; and there is no way
to express a commented U+1234 character unless the document's encoding
includes that character.

> given that translate (in XSL 1) of all non iso-8859-1 characters to an
> empty string is easy do you think you could send me one? :)
its easier of course in xsl2 but

xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:value-of select="translate(.,translate(.,'ABC',''),'')"/>

will get rid of all characters other than ABC, just make a string of all
230 or so legal latin1 charas and you are done.

David


________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________