I've created a XSLT file to display list of books and sorted it alphabetically by title. I'm almost there. Here's my remaining problem. My output looks like this.

A Time to Kill
An Atom Away
Moby Dick
Stroke of Midnight
The Scarlet Letter

"A Time to Kill" should be the last item in the list because you don't file books by a starting "A", it should be alphabetized by "Time". And "The" should be ignored and filed under "Scarlet Letter" instead. I'm trying to use a substring function but I'm testing strings of varying length and then throwing them out if found... but only for sorting purposes, then sorting on the remainder and displaying the whole thing. [:S] I "should" wind up with this...

An Atom Away
Moby Dick
The Scarlet Letter
Stroke of Midnight
A Time to Kill

Am I making this harder than it needs to be? Or should I keep beating my head against it?

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Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-Johann von Goethe

When Two Hearts Race... Both Win.
-Dove Chocolate Wrapper

Chroniclemaster1, Founder of www.EarthChronicle.com
A Growing History of our Planet, by our Planet, for our Planet.

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Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-Johann von Goethe

When Two Hearts Race... Both Win.
-Dove Chocolate Wrapper

Chroniclemaster1, Founder of www.EarthChronicle.com
A Growing History of our Planet, by our Planet, for our Planet.

Like all text processing this is easier in XSLT 2.0 using regular expressions.

But if you have to use 1.0, I can't see why you would want to use substring(). The obvious approach is along the lines

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="starts-with($x, 'An ')">
     <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($x, 'An ')"/>

...etc

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