RE: XPath regular expression syntax, crippled?

> All except it implements the precise XSLT Regex standard. And I am
> pulling my hair out, I can't seem to find a concise specification of
> what that is

Appendix 11 of my XPath 2.0 book

> Is it really so heavily crippled as it appears?

I guess the extent to which it appears crippled is in the eyes of the
beholder.

We did try to keep it to a subset that is readily available from most regex
engines, that is well specified (a lot of the Perl bits and pieces are very
poorly specified, vary between versions, and so on), and that works in a
non-procedural environment.
> 
> So, what am I missing? If I am missing nothing, then I will quickly
> ask Michael to consider a flag to Saxon that permits full
> JDK 1.4+ regex syntax, or perhaps that he might allow doing this 
> with a flag. It's amazing that Michael did all this work with that
> regex translator machine only in order to cripple perfectly fine 
> and useful regular expressions. Will there be any chance in working
> on XSLT editors to get the full thing back?

Actually, the work was done mainly by James Clark.

My priority is always conformance first, extended functionality second. The
WGs also decided to make a strict conformance statement, in the interests of
interoperability, that regex extensions were not permitted - though they
could be done, of course, through extension functions.

Michael Kay