RE: Identifying patterns within texts

You can use regular expression matching in XSLT 2.0 to do this, but a more difficult question is, "How do I accurately recognize a mathematical expression?" For example, suppose you have a statement like, "You should receive your first check in 1/2 weeks.", where the intention is to express "one to two weeks". How will you write a regular expression to know that this is NOT a mathematical expression where "What is 1/2 in decimal format?" contains an identical string that IS a mathematical expression?
-- 
Charles Knell
cknell@xxxxxxxxxx - email



-----Original Message-----
From:     Themis, Jim <jthemis@xxxxxx>
Sent:     Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:24:09 -0600
To:       <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:   Identifying patterns within texts

Well I am 4 days into understanding XSLT (and well 4 days into fully
understanding xml).  I am working on a file conversion utility where it
would be an xml to xml conversion.  In my research, I came across XSLT
(along with XSL, XSL-FO,  XSD, DTD, etc).  My question is the following,
if I have an element with text in it:

 

                        <item>What is 1/2 in decimal format?</item>

 

 

Is there a way using a style sheet to actually manipulate the text such
that the resulting output would be:

              < question>What is <math>1/2</math> in decimal
format</item>

 

Basically, I need to search through the text of an element and attempt
to detect math?  Most of the tutorials use xml to HTML as an example and
play with elements and attributes.  I was just wandering if the XSLT
spec allows for this type of searching/parsing?

 

Thanks,

Jim Themis