Re: Representation of strings and characters in XML version of ixml

> My off-the-cuff reaction is to think that when the ixml spec says
> the output should be XML, the escaping of < and & is covered
> implicitly.
That's right. I have slightly different output routines for attribute and element content, since attributes must also encode the enclosing quote, though I suppose I could encode those in element content as well without loss (but I don't).

Steven

>
> > On 25,Dec2021, at 10:32 AM, John Lumley <john@saxonica.com> wrote:
> >
> > There is still a problem regarding some characters that need escaping into the XML representation that I encountered in the grammar for XPath, e.g. the production for a value comparison, which uses ‘>=‘ which needs to be serialised as ‘&lt;=‘., and similar cases with apostrophe and double quote. I’m not sure how that should be handled…
> >
> > Forgive me, but I am a thousand miles away from code-full laptop so cannot get to the editable examples…..
> >
> > John Lumley
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> >> On 25 Dec 2021, at 16:38, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 24,Dec2021, at 11:29 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On Fri, 2021-12-24 at 11:53 -0700, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> That is, I like knowing, from whether something is a dstring
> >>>> or an sstring, … hmm. I don’t know, from that, what I was
> >>>> about to say I knew.
> >>>
> >>> i've not been very active here (sorry) so maybe this is off kilter a
> >>> little - some languages/formats distinguish, though - e.g. in the Unix
> >>> shells, "$$" is the process ID of the current shell, and '$$" is two
> >>> dollar signs: interpolation happens in "..." and not in '...' so they
> >>> have to be treated differently.
> >>>
> >>> But maybe that's not what's going on here?
> >>>
> >>
> >> Good point, but you are right that what is going on here is
> >> different. In ixml double and single quotes are used interchangeably;
> >> the only difference is that within single quotes, double quotes
> >> do not need to be escaped while single quotes do, and vice
> >> versa.
> >>
> >> The only task affected by the decisions about whether the
> >> XML representation should preserve or lose the distinction between
> >> single and double quotes in the ixml representation are, as far as
> >> I know, re-serializing the grammar from XML to ixml, or serializing
> >> in ixml a grammar first composed in XML.
> >>
> >> If the distinctions are preserved, then when we re-serialize a
> >> grammar, the quotation marks will be unchanged, and when we
> >> serialize a born-XML grammar the grammar author can control
> >> whether the ixml grammar uses single or double quotes.
> >>
> >> However, since we have agreed to suppress whitespace outside
> >> of literal strings and to lose the distinctions between ‘:’ and ‘=‘
> >> and between ‘;’ and ‘|’, re-serializing is not going to reproduce the
> >> original character stream in all cases.
> >>
> >> The more I think about it, the more I think that preserving
> >> the distinction between dstring and sstring is just a relic of the
> >> time when the design wanted to preserve the accidentals of the
> >> ixml grammar, and is at best misleading. So I now lean towards
> >> “let us mark them both as @string”.
> >>
> >> Hex notation, on the other hand, I continue to regard as
> >> something I’d like to preserve.
> >>
> >> Michael
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 27 December 2021 13:47:37 UTC