Re: [relax-ng] Proposal for a regex module, draft 0.1

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

Looks good. If we were to provide a built-in regex capability for RELAX NG,
I think there are compelling advantages to doing it in this sort of way
using the existing element set:

- easy of learning/use

- ease of implementation; I haven't verified this yet, but I strongly
suspect that something like this would be relatively little extra work for a
RELAX NG implementation, because a lot of the existing parsing/validation
machinery for elements/attributes could be easily reused

However, doing it as an annotation loses one thing that I think is very
important.  If <regex> was a standard RELAX NG element (like <list>) then
you could compose complex regexes using define/ref. This would be a massive
win.  Complex regexes in XML Schema are incredibly hard to understand, debug
and maintain because of the lack of the define/ref mechanism.

This is something we should seriously consider for RELAX NG 2.0.

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
To: <relax-ng@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 11:50 AM
Subject: [relax-ng] Proposal for a regex module, draft 0.1


> I ran with James's idea in the telcon today about expressing regexes
> via the existing element set.  I propose the following schema
> for them.  Note that this is an annotation rather than a change in RELAX
NG.
>
> default namespace = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
> namespace r = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/regex/1.0"
>
> start = element r:regex {foreign, regex}
>
> regex =
> element oneOrMore | zeroOrMore | optional | choice | group
> {foreign & regex+} |
> element value {foreignAttribute*, string} |
> anyChar
>
> anyChar =
> element r:anyChar {
> ((attribute from {string}, attribute to {string})? |
> attribute charType {string})?,
> foreign & element except {foreign & anyChar+}
>
> foreign = foreignAttribute*, foreignElement*
>
> where foreignAttribute and foreignElement are as in RELAX NG.
>
> The r:regex element can be a child of data (for regular expressions
> in content/attribute values) or of anyName/nsName (to specify a
> local-name-part via a regular expression).
>
> The r:anyChar element matches any character if there are no
> attributes.  It matches any character between "from" and "to"
> (single characters) if these attributes are present.  It matches
> any char in a named class such as "Ps" or "IsDevanagari" if the charType
> attribute is present.  The except child element allows subtraction;
> for example, "[^A-Z]" is <anyChar><except><anyChar from="A" to "Z"/>
> </except></anyChar>.
>
> Comments?
>
> --
> John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
cowan@ccil.org
> To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
> are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the
language
> that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
>         --_The Hobbit_
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription
> manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>
>
>
>