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Re: Regular expression functions (Was: Re: [xsl] comments on December F&O draft)


Subject: Re: Regular expression functions (Was: Re: [xsl] comments on December F&O draft)
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2002 21:20:25 GMT

> I assumed you'd nicked the idea from Omnimark or somewhere 
wel some of its in some bits of omnimark but the processing model is so
different there (you have access to start and end tags as strings, if
you want and variables have this strange property of being updatable:-)

So mainly I just made it up as I typed it into the two email
messages....

> So priority would be a real issue, in case there were overlapping
> matches. And the XML Schema regexp syntax would need to be amended so
> that it can match the start/end of strings.

Yes. The latter is needed in anycase, fuly anchored regexp's make sense
for schema validating content models of elements but are not really what
you want for a general search/replace system.


> Hmm... I think that both would be confusing, given that normal
> template match attributes aren't expressions or AVTs.

well they are effectively a restricted form of node-valued expression.
One could argue that the regexp ought to be a restricted type of string
valued expression. (Or alternatively, more javascripty perhaps one
should have regexp objects distinct from strings...)

> If patterns and data type tests could be unified...
hmm, of course a schema language that types its elements with xpath
patterns rather than schema complex types might look more schematron-y
than xml schema-like, but I know what you mean..


I think you may have a point about matching on types though, brings
xsl:for-each back up to par with xquery flwr and typeswitch.

David

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