> But this only replaces "&lt;"/"&gt;" and not "native" '<' characters.

what do you mean by this? You really need to give a (complete, well
formed, but small) example input and desired output.

&lt; is the way of marking up a , in XML if you want an element with
content 3 < 4 then you need
<x> 3 &lt; 4 <x>

so what you see in the serialisatrion is &lt; but the element content is
<.

anr the replace expression you posted would set the variable to 2 xxx 4.


If your input is

<x> 3 < 4 <x>


then the input is not well formed, ie not XML and so can not be
processed by any XML applictaion, XSLT in particular.

David

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