Using W3C Regular Expressions

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

The XML Schema: Data Types specification (PR) defines a regular expression 
language in:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#regexs
(more description in: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/#regexAppendix)

One thing I don't see is discussion of splitting content through regular 
expressions.  Since the W3C Regular Expressions appear to be intended only 
for pattern-matching validation, this isn't exactly surprising, but I'm 
trying to think beyond that.

It looks like I can still do things like:
(\d{2,5})(\d{2})-(\d{2})

on:

1970-11

And extract 19, 70, 11.  (I know that the simple match works, thanks to 
http://www.xfront.org/xml-schema/, which is pretty cool.)

Is that a reasonable expectation?  Or have the rules changed underneath my 
understanding of regular expressions in ways that make that expectation 
inappropriate?

Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books