RE: XPath Grammar

> I need help about XPath grammar.
> In W3C specification a literal is stated as the
> following:
> 
> [29]    Literal    ::=    '"' [^"]* '"'  
>    			| "'" [^']* "'" 
> 

XPath uses the strange convention of mixing BNF and regular expressions
in a single production rule.

A more conventional approach would be either to write this in BNF (using
the "-" operator to mean "except") as

> [29]    Literal    ::=    '"' (Char - '"')* '"'  
>    			| "'" (Char - "'")* "'" 

or to do the whole thing as a regular expression:

   Literal ::= ("[^"]*"|'[^']*')

Michael Kay


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