A word of caution, though.

According to the XSLT 1.0 specification:

"NOTE:It is possible for two conforming XSLT processors not to sort exactly 
the same."
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#element-sort

So, one should always check whether the character ordering used for sorting 
by a particular XSLT 1.0 processor matches the expectations. Also, different 
results are possible using different XSLT 1.0 processors.

Even in XSLR 2.0/Xpath 2.0 character ordering is not guaranteed over 
different XSLT 2.0 processors. The only collation all conformant XSLT 2.0 
processors are required to support is the Unicode code-points collation.

Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.

P.S.
In case you need to compare two strings using XSLT 1.0, do have a look at 
this six-years-old code snippet:

http://www.topxml.com/code/default.asp?p=3&id=v20010205033413



"alexl" <alextheblade@g...> wrote in message 
news:1181231025.838954.31390@p......
> amazing!! thanks!
>
>> Like this:
>>
>> <xsl:template match="/root">
>>    <xsl:for-each select="string">
>>      <xsl:sort select="@priority" />
>>      <xsl:if test="position() = 1">
>>        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
>>      </xsl:if>
>>    </xsl:for-each>
>> </xsl:template>
>>
>> --
>>
>>         Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
>>        http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/
>
>