Thanks for the thoughts, Dimitre. Could also use some other character (like
b  (U+2420) or b$ (U+2424)) and convert it later. But in fact I have no need
to force a whitespace character on output. If I donbt mention it, the client
may not even notice that all of her PIs have lost a leading space after her
files are bfixedb with my XSLT. But the spaces are summarily unimportant.
(Although it does make me wonder how they got there in the first place. :-)

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Syd, I see two ways (if you really need to) to maintain a PI whose string
value starts with a whitespace character:

  1. Enclose this value in some strippable non-whitespace characters (say
apostrophes or quotes), or,

  2. If the value is guaranteed not to end with a space character, just use
the reversed string value, and when you get that in your code, reverse it
back.

Hope this helps,