regex help

A colleague raised this question below regarding the use of XSD pattern
facet.

Can someone help please?

Thanks,

Scott Tsao
Enterprise Architecture and Integration
The Boeing Company


-----Original Message-----

I'm trying to design a W3C XML Schema type description for an element
containing an arbitrary number of quoted strings separated by arbitrary
whitespace.  The contents of the quoted items are themselves limited to
alphanumerics, whitespace, and common punctuation characters, excluding
embedded quote characters.  (The double quote here is chosen as an
arbitrary delimeter and has no special significance.)

Example:
"abc" "de f" "123_456"
"foo bar" "etc."

I'm not aware of a "built-in" XML Schema type that can support this
representation directly.  It also appears that the W3C XML Schema
"pattern" 
facet (allowing the specification of a regular expression for a type
format) does not support the "non-greedy" quantifier syntax, e.g., "*?",
"+?" that is common in many regular expression engines.

Can anyone suggest a regex to define this format without the non-greedy
quantifiers, or perhaps an XML Schema representation that can handle
this format directly?

Received on Wednesday, 3 January 2007 19:46:06 UTC