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Re: parsing XML using regular expressions

• From: Matt Sergeant <matt@s...>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 22:14:21 +0100 (BST)

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> We have occasional battles here about the wisdom of using
> non-XML-parser-based tools to process XML, and regular expressions always
> seem to come up.
> 
> I've got a reader question that sort of ties into a (non-regex-based) Java
> project I'm working on, about the viability of regex and other text-based
> processing for XML work.
> 
> Has anyone written a generic XML parser, even a somewhat broken one, that's
> built on regular expressions?  I remember hearing of something a long while
> ago, but I can't find it.

Stolen from "Designing XML Internet Applications" (a really early and
slightly innacurate book in places) is the single regexp

([^<]*)<(\/)?([^>]+)>

You have to execute it in a loop. I'll leave it to you to figure
out or come begging for help :-)

I'd show you more of the code, but you asked for Java, not Perl...

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org

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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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