Can someone tell me how to select where the subgroup starts with a letter OR a character? To be specific, the character is ##. Right now I have:

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

and it selects everything that starts with a letter, but in some cases I have a subgroup at the beginning that starts with ##.

Much appreciated!

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

I'm sure you don't mean this, starts-with() returns a boolean and comparing that with the attribute is going to give nonsense. I'm sure you meant to write

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

If you're in XSLT 1.0 and can't use regular expressions then the simplest is to write "or":

 <xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER) or
starts-with(@letter,'##']">



Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Sorry, at the top of my page I have:
<xsl:param name="gpLETTER" select="''"/>
<xsl:variable name="letter" select="normalize-space($gpLETTER)"/>
Then I have:
<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

anyway, I am totally new to this and trying to edit someone else's code :-) So, I have added this:

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER) OR @letter=starts-with(@letter,'##']">

My page returns and error that says there is an invalid token in that line. I appreciate your help.

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[starts-with(@letter,$letter) or starts-with(@letter,'##')]">

You're missing a closing parenthesis ')'

Then I have:
<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

This is garbage, though I think it might just work by accident: the rules for comparing a node-set to a boolean are pretty strange (and they change in 2.0, because no-one thought anyone would seriously want to do it). I'm sure you want

select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER)]">

So, I have added this:

<xsl:for-each select="/hw.list/list.subgroup[@letter=starts-with(@letter,$gpLETTER) OR @letter=starts-with(@letter,'##']">

XPath, like XML, is case-sensitive. When I wrote "or", I meant "or", I didn't mean "OR".

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference