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> > > >>Won't our desperate Perl hackers' beloved $_ variable be significantly less > >>useful if it contains the *entire* document. > > > >Just as it's not useful in processing HTML. Regexps that don't match across > >line boundaries are the most common problem I've seen in HTML-processing > >Perl scripts. Looks like that will continue until people figure out that > >Perl's line "Feature" is jsut a big when used with XML/HTML. > > > > Bang goes the the notion of a lightweigth XML app. then! Thou shalt always > parse! > Nonsense! Regexps that fail across line boundaries are only due to lazy DPHs. The "s" modifer to a regex will treat the entire string (i.e., document) as a single target. The problem here is that _insignificant_ whitespace (a newline) is treated significantly. A regex modifier which treated newline, tabs, etc., as spaces would really help reduce this problem. (Larry Wall doesn't follow this mailing list does he?) > XML as a friendly format to, say, DPH needs some explaining. To use Perl to > read/write XML > you *must* use an XML parser. Indeed any tool intending to read/write XML > needs to use a > *fully blown parser* to get at the document. Bye bye the entire Unix family > of line oriented text processing apps:-( > Maybe you just need to put a filter at the beginning of your pipeline to normalize whitespace to whatever you need. Matthew ----------------------------------------------------- Matthew Fuchs matt@w... http://cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/fuchs ----------------------------------------------------- xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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