Re: Regular Expressions I18N

>Message-ID: <373845BB.B1D29F72@jclark.com>
>Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 21:59:07 +0700
>From: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
>To: www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
>Subject: Regular Expressions I18N

>Appendix E of the Datatypes spec doesn't appear to pay much attention to
>I18N issues.

Very true.

At this early stage we wanted to see whether regular expressions as string
contraints were even something that we wanted to support;  personally, I do,
but some questions were raised whether the average "end-user" would be able
to understand them.  Thus, we didn't want to expend alot of time writing the
ultimate regex spec.

Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen were kind enough to allow us to publish the
WD with their high-level description of regexs (which are VERY good IMHO).
In Perl 5.002, there is no special support for I18N in the regex library
(other than Perl 5's general Unicode support), hence what is included in the
WD doesn't "pay much attention".

>I suggest you look at Unicode TR 18
>(http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr18/).

>Also you might want to sync up with the folks doing ECMAScript v2. 
>They're adding regular expressions, which I believe are based on Perl's,
>but have (or will have) some reasonable I18N support
>(http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/tc39/es2_rege.pdf).

Thanx!  At a quick glance, both resources look very interesting.

If regex's do end-up staying in the spec we will definitely harmonize with
TR18 and the ECMAScript work.

pvb

Received on Thursday, 13 May 1999 15:02:11 UTC