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: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 21:21:04 GMT
> I'm not saying that regular expressions arn't useful in many cases, 
> merely that they are not sufficiently powerful to describe how to 
> transform (i.e. parse) a piece of text into a tree.

well yes that's true. You couldn't for example parse xml markup into an
XML tree using rexexps. But the typical use case is rather less than
that.  You have an XML file but the markup stops at too course a level
for some purpose, the character data of some element has some non xml
structure, comma or space separated list perhaps (or as in my real
example some words quoted with ' rather than with an element), that you
want to process in the transform. Allowing regxep processing to access
the full power of the element constructors (in xquery or xslt) would
prove a lot more useful than "just" having a regexp string replace.

David


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