Re: [xsl] DOM and XML parser

[Jeni Tennison <jeni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Didier,

> Jeni said:
> [Taking the analogy with regexps further, there was an interesting
> talk at Extreme which touched on the possibility of getting more
> detailed information returned from matching on an XSLT pattern in
> much the same way as you might get more detailed information
> returned from matching on a regexp, about the submatches within the
> pattern/regexp.]
>
> Didier replies:
> Gee, sound interesting. Its too bad I couldn't be at the conference.
> It sounds like a lot of interesting stuff happened there. Do you
> mean that more than a boolean value could be returned? Like, for
> instance, some info about the node's contained collection, is that
> it?

The talk was about binary queries in the fxgrep/fxt work at the
University of Trier. See http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/PSI/DocML/
for information, and their paper is at
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~aberlea/publications/extreme2002/queries.pdf.

As I understood it, it was a way of assigning variables based on
things that were matched during the pattern match. If you have a '%'
in front of a location path within an expression then the node-set
identified by that location path is assigned to a variable. So for
example:

<xsl:template match="book[%@price]">
  ...
</xsl:template>

then the current node is the book element (as normal) and the variable
$1 (I think) is the price attribute.

The rest of the paper got rather technical about querying using forest
grammars and things, but I thought this was quite an interesting idea.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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