[Bug 1850] [F&O] how do ranges work in case-insensitive mode?

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1850





------- Additional Comments From holstege@mathling.com  2005-08-31 22:33 -------
Michael, I think I meant what your "I was going to propose..." text says.
(As usual, of course, you said it better.)

While the apparent difference with Perl and Java might be troubling, I think
what we are discovering here is that they are both woefully underspecified.

I do have at least one data point that the semantics you outline is
implementable in XQuery regular expressions, FWIW.

I am not happy with making these be an error, because we see plenty of scenarios 
where regular expressions are not literals, but constructed, and I think the 
semantics you suggest makes sense, even if it leads to results that may seem 
surprising until you think about it.  I also think that you set of cases is too 
broad: By your rules patterns with such innocuous items as "[^\s] or or "\p{Zs}" 
cause errors in case-insensitive mode. I also don't see why patterns with back
references should be errors. 

It gets to the point where you either have some pretty complex rules about when 
these constructs are "non-confusing" from a case-sensitivity point of view, and 
therefore OK, or you are limiting regular expressions in case-insensitive mode 
almost to the point of uselessness, where the workaround is, with a fair amount 
of pain, to reconstruct essentially the semantics proposed.

Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2005 22:33:27 UTC