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Re: Support for lookaround regexp in XSLT -- any time

Subject: Re: Support for lookaround regexp in XSLT -- any time soon?
From: Hermann Stamm-Wilbrandt <STAMMW@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2013 23:43:47 +0100
Re:  Support for lookaround regexp in XSLT -- any time
> For example, there's a sorry history of patches to the spec regarding the
> handling of a newline character appearing as the last thing in the input.
>
yeah, negative lookahead assertions can be really handy.

<xsd:pattern value="\d"/>
defines as a single digit, and should not match eg. "7\n".

The PCRE regexp "^\d$" does match "7" as well as "7\n".

"^\d(?!\n)$" does only match a single digit.



Mit besten Gruessen / Best wishes,

Hermann Stamm-Wilbrandt
Level 3 support for XML Compiler team and Fixpack team lead
WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/HermannSW/
https://twitter.com/HermannSW/
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  |Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>                                                                                                                   |
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  |xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,                                                                                                                  |
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  |03/01/2013 11:40 AM                                                                                                                               |
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  |Re:  Support for lookaround regexp in XSLT -- any time soon?                                                                                 |
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>unsure about the original reason to restrict regex, as it seems to
just confuse people when a regex they lovingly crafted elsewhere
doesn't work (not that the various java, Perl, etc schisms help).

I don't know the history in full, but I think there were several reasons
XSD adopted a "minimal" regex subset:

(a) they wanted to be sure it could be widely implemented using existing
regex engines (i.e. a highest common factor approach)

(b) they wanted to exclude anything that didn't make sense in an
international Unicode context (so things like word boundaries were
immediately suspect)

(c) they wanted to make sure that what they included was well specified.
Finding solid specifications of regex constructs is remarkably difficult;
there's a culture of very informal specification. Many times when adding
constructs to the XPath spec, we've had to do empirical tests on existing
regex engines such as PCRE to see how they actually handle edge cases, and
very often we find differences between different engines that couldn't be
guessed from the documentation. For example, there's a sorry history of
patches to the spec regarding the handling of a newline character appearing
as the last thing in the input. It's a shame when a feature gets left out
because we can't decide what it should do in edge cases, but the standards
process tends to lead to people asking such questions and expecting
answers.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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