I am creating an index of paper titles using xsl:for-each-group to select and group by the titles of the papers alphabetically using the first character of the title.

Eg:
<xsl:for-each-group select="//section" group-by="upper-case(substring(normalize-space(paperTitle),1,1))">
<xsl:sort select="current-grouping-key()"/>
. . .

Some of the paper titles start with double left hand quotes. Others start with a numeral. In those cases I want the group-by to use the first alpha character in the title string. I could do this if regular expressions were allowed in the group-by attribute, but they're not.

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