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: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 22:58:15 GMT
Interesting!

If I understand your syntax it wasn't so far from the syntax and
functionality of the sketch I made earlier. Nice to know I'm not
completely mad (or at least not alone:-)

I agree if your regexps are matching html with lots of < in them
the quoting in attributes can be a pain (see parallel thread on <<)
but in the xslt context at least, probably it should be in an attribute
anyway. As Xpath gets more power, and so xpaths get longer there may at
some point be a general requirement to offer an element content
alternative to xpath match and select attributes so that " and ' don't
need to be quoted at all and cdata can be used in place of &lt;s if
desired, but that seems to be a general xpath issue (in an xslt context,
if not for your tool) rather than something specific to regexps.

having implemented the beast, do you have insights into the trickier
questions that I managed to duck so far by denying all knowledge of my
own suggestion?  

In particular how do multiple matches work?
is one match/replace happening at a time in the order of your
call-matcher elements or are they being searched concurrently with some
priority rules saying which happens in the case of overlaps?

If your first call-matcher replaces some bit of the input string by
some tree fragment of  interspersed text and elements  (and
text contained within elements) then does the second call-matcher just
match on the remaining parts of the original string or does it also get
to work on the text in the tree structre that's being built by the
earlier matches?

David


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