Re: two regexp related questions

On 19/05/2011 18:45, Julian Reschke wrote:

Hi there,

I've got two regexp-related questions.

1) Is it correct that XSLT/XPath2's regular expressions do not support
non-capturing groups (as shown in
<http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.util.regex/NoGroup.html>)?

Yes. This is being added in 3.0.

2) With respect to analyze-string, and the captured regex-groups:

I'm using a regex like

([A-Z]+) = ([A-Z]+) ( ; ([A-Z]+) = ([A-Z]+) )*

for matching things like

a=b;c=d;e=f

Why not use the regex

([A-Z]+) = ([A-Z]+)

and rely on xsl:matching-substring being called multiple times?

Alternatively, first use tokenize() to split on the semicolons, and then
put each token through xsl:analyze-string.

Personally, I find long regexes very difficult to get right, and try to
split the task up into small pieces that I can understand and debug.