• To: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>
• Subject: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 19:40:09 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B02666F@c...>
• References: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B02666F@c...>

At 1:38 PM -0800 3/28/03, Jeff Lowery wrote:
>This thread sounds more like an argument for full-document validation prior
>to processing, or at the very least making sure you've done document version
>checking.  Once that happens, regexing should be fine (assuming the
>programmer understands the schema or specification the version info is based
>on).

No, validation doesn't help because it has absolutely nothing to say 
about comments, processing instructions, CDATA sections, white space 
in tags, or character entities and very little to say about entity 
references. It's just too hard to tell what is and isn't the string 
you're looking for without using a genuine parser.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• Follow-Ups:
  • If XML is too hard for regular expressions, perhaps he'd be better off with a parser
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
  • RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
    • From: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>

• Prev by Date: Re: ID/IDREF makes XML generation NP-hard
• Next by Date: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
• Previous by thread: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
• Next by thread: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread