Re: Regular expression functions (Was: Re: comments on

> From some JScript documentation:

jscript> w'assat:-) sed's the thing (or emacs lisp:-)

> I agree with your analysis about regexp replace in general, though
> it's not altogether useless - when global, at least it goes some way
> towards helping with the classic multi-string-replacement problem. For
> example, to escape newline characters with "\n", tabs with "\t" and
> carriage returns with "\r":

but usually replace threads go

1) how to I replace a by b

2) to which you give a recursive template answer 

3) then the original responder comes back and says

4) oh yes but actually I also want to replace b by c and d by the chunk of
   XML that's in file abc.xml....

If you're going go add regexp support I don't think two functions and a
paragraph of text in F&O is enough. "If a job's worth doing it's worth
doing well" as my mum always said (not that I ever believed her:-)

> I think that you need a sequence of match positions *and lengths* in

ah yes well emacs match position data has beginning and end positions,
but beginnings and lengths would do:-)

> how do you define the scope, for one thing?
they'd be template-local variables 


<xsl:apply-regexp-templates-to-string select="text()"/>

...

<xsl:regexp-template match="\sqrt{([^{}]*)}">
<msqrt>
<xsl:apply-regexp-templates-to-string select="$1"/>
</msqrt>
</xsl:regexp-template>


<xsl:regexp-template match="\gamma">
<mi>&#947;</mi>
</xsl:regexp-template>

....




\gamma + \sqrt{\gamma} 

goes in

<mi>&#947;</mi> + <msqrt><mi>&#947;</mi></msqrt>

comes out (a first approximation to a tex->mathml conversion)

David

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