[xslt] How to generate alphabet using xslt?

[Vlastimil Krejcir <krejcir ics muni cz>]

  Hello,

  I would like to solve some issue about generating alphabet -- exactly I 
need some cycle goes through every letter in alphabet and generate html 
code (for example) like this:

<a href="#A">A</a>
<a href="#B">B</a>
...
<a href="#Z">Z</a>

I find there is no classic "for" or "while" loop in xslt. I have used 
classic recursion way which do the work as good as classic imperative 
loop. So I can generate numbers from 65 to 96 (which are equivalents to 
whole alphabet in ASCII). XPath-2.0 defines function 
codepoints-to-string() which can solve everything = transforming the 
numbers into a letters. But xsltproc does not follow XPath-2.0 (yet). Do 
you know some ellegant solution how to do it with XSLT-1.0 and XPath-1.0?

I have found some solutions, but not ellegant I think. The first one is to 
include the alphapet letters into processed xml document (ugly solution I 
think). Another one is to use string variable with whole alphabet 
($alphabet = "ABCD...Z") and cut one letter in each recursion call (not 
bad, but still it is like using crutches). And the last solution I have 
found -- using html coding for letters (&#<number>;) for writing letters 
and only the numbers for references: <a href="#l65">&#65;</a>

What do you think about? I only beginning with xslt and I am sure there 
are a lot of tricks for writing ellegant code. But I don't know them.

Thanks for help

Vlastik

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Mgr. Vlastimil Krejčíř
Library and Information Centre, Institute of Computer Science
Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic
Email: krejcir (at) ics (dot) muni (dot) cz
ICQ: 163963217
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