Re: [xslt] regexp extension?

[Bruce Miller <bruce miller nist gov>]

[I'm still listenin'; just absorbing all the suggestions!]

Thomas Broyer wrote:

> En réponse à Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>:
> 
>>  Very clearly, I would prefer not to depend on another library being
>>installed. POSIX regexps are there, anything else requires installing
>>another library, I won't add this at least not in the default setup.
>>
> 
> EXSLT is changing to use XML Schema regexp syntax, which is not totally POSIX.
> Jeni Tennisson explains the differences from the JavaScript regexps, and most 
> of them also apply to POSIX (JavaScript regexps are a superset of POSIX ones), 
> in <http://lists.fourthought.com/pipermail/exslt/2001-December/000368.html>
> 
> RX-XML, from Hackerlab, <http://regexps.com/rx-xml.html> is under GPL and 
> implements Unicode-aware XML Schema regexps. Exactly what we need, isn't it?


Unicode awareness is something I've been concerned about with some of 
the libs.
And the GPL is a concern (taken up in another thread).

Also, rx-xml appears to only implement regexp match operations, directly;
a quick scan doesn't show any replace type operations.   Hopefully, that's
not a major complication, but it may require some thought to extend.


> I think we should detect if the RX-XML lib and compile the regexp libexslt 
> module depending on its installation state:
>   If not installed Then
>      do not try to compile with it
>   Else
>      If disableByTheUser Then
>         do not compile with it
>      Else
>         compile the regexp module
>      End If
>   End If


Yeah, that's what I had in mind with the configure magic.  The only problem
is that it doesn't read _quite_ that way in configure :>
To the extent that we go with a non EXSLT compliant lib, though, we probably
would only want to include it if explicitly enabled by the user.


> Eventually, we may propose POSIX regexps if RX-XML is not available but this 
> won't be EXSLT-compliant so we loose the benefits of EXSLT: be portable among 
> EXSLT-compliant processors.
> 
> Tom.
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