> actually the saxon documentation gives the following example for
> xsl:variable...

must be a very old example: very early drafts of xslt used expr.

> but it *does* throw out
> <xsl:variable name="x" select="&#32;&#32;&#32;&#32;......"/>
> as an *Unexpected EOF*

As Andrew noted (but I missed) you want that to be an Xpath string so

 <xsl:variable name="x" select="'                        '"/>
                                ^ 
David

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