alphabetical listing

Hello !

I am looking for a way to list all occurences of a given element in a separate
file given the first or first two letters. I want that because i need a listing,
and have a lot of items.

What i do for now is doing a for-each select="item[starts-with(name,'a')]" ...
with a through z, A through Z and a cumbersome last for-each with many 'and not
starts-with' which is ugly. And slow.

There MUST be another, more efficient, more elegant, cleaner way of doing that !
But sadly i can't seem to find the idea how... If you have any idea, feel free
to help !

Nicolas