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At 07:45 11/02/00 -0500, you wrote: >Sean McGrath scripsit: > >> [John Cowan] >> >I happened to know that the element always appeared on a single >> >line of the file: the start tag, the character data, the end tag. >> >> How could you possibly know that? > >Because the documents were 100% generated by a single >program whose behavior was entirely predictable. > I guessed as much. The problem from an engineering viewpoint is that we have no way of expressing the syntactic assumptions if the Fgrep programs for those who will work with these systems in the future. Murphys law dictates that sooner or later a perfectly sound XML document will come along that blows my Fgrep out of the water. I think this is a very good example of why something like XFM would be very useful. I floated the idea of XFM (XML Features Manifest) late last year as a declarative way for creators of XML content to formally specify what syntactic constructs their content uses. i.e. external entity references, internal document type declaration subsets, marked sections and so on. I believe something like XFM would allow the Desperate Fgrep Hacker to add a safety net to her work by first checking the XFM file for an XML corpus to see if the assumptions present in the regular expressions are justified. In the mean time, I do not use FGrep the way you use it. I first generate an XML incarnation of ESIS I have dubbed PYX using the xmln utility. This way, I can be sure that I am grepping true PCDATA, true element type names etc. xmln is available on the Pyxie website, if anyone wants to give it a whirl. xmln is built on top of expat and is non-validating. xmlv is built on top of rxp and is validating. Both xmln and xmlv generate the same output notation called PYX. regards, http://www.pyxie.org - an Open Source XML Processing library for Python *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html ***************************************************************************
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