- From: Krzysztof Maczyński <1981km@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 11:59:10 +0200
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
Dear WG, The following 3 requested features (suitable for XPath 2.1, I presume) are motivated by something I've tried to do at work recently (amd used a workaround). 1. Please provide versions of matches, replace and tokenize that do not treat their argument as a regular expression. The use case is to deal with trimming, extracting or otherwise processing of arbitrary strings, potentially read from some input and not hard coded in the expression. 2. Please lift the requirement that some functions (replace, tokenize) cannot work with a regular expression matching the empty string when ^ or $ is involved. These should be thus consistently treated as virtual characters for the purpose of matching. 3. This takes 1. a bit further. I sometimes need (not only in XPath, also e.g. in ECMAScript, but that's another pair of shoes) a regular expression that matches only one string which is computed, not known in advance. A function producing such an expression from any string would be useful. ad 3. Note 1. If there were a universal escape characted, 3. would be easy to do manually - interleave the string with one of the same length consisting of escape characters. Unfortunately, there isn't. Worth raising with XML Schema WG? Note 2. The function in 3. would better be specified syntactically with simple escaping mechanisms applied as necessary, not up to equivalence. This would enable subsequent slight tweaks to the result, often desirable, before using it as a regular expression.
Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 09:59:51 UTC