RE: sorting question

> Is it possible to sort strings without ignoring whitespace 
> i.e. spaces are 
> included in the sorting? 

XSLT 1.0 gives you no control over the collating sequence, other than choice
of language. Some implementations will ignore spaces (and perhaps hyphens,
etc), others won't, and they are all equally conformant.

XSLT 2.0 allows you to select a collating algorithm using a URI, but it's
still implementation-defined what collating algorithms are available and how
they are named. Saxon provides URIs that map to the underlying collation
facilities offered by the Java and .NET platforms, both of which provide you
far more facilities than you ever wanted (though they probably leave out the
one feature that you _do_ want...).

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/