I have xml like this

<Data>
<name>name</name>
<age>12</age>
<country>uk</country>
<city>city</city>
<subTown>subTown</subTown>
<subcity>subcity</subcity>
</Data>

I want to sort it with XSLT so that the output looks like

<Data>
<age>12</age>
<city>city</city>
<country>uk</country>
<name>name</name>
<subTown>subTown</subTown>
<subcity>subcity</subcity>
</Data>

the problem i'm having is <subcity> appears before <subTown> when i do a normal sort.

any help would be appreciated

If you want detailed control over collating sequences you'll need to use XSLT 2.0. Even then, it's to some extent product dependent. But you appear to want Unicode codepoint collation, which you can request in XSLT 2.0 by specifying collation="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions/collation/codepoint" as an attribute of xsl:sort.

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