Re: [xml-dev] Ways of breaking out of normal interpretation andmeaning

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Costello, Roger L. scripsit:

> In the regular expression language, the dash symbol is a special
> character that means range.  This regular expression says any digit
> from zero to nine:
> 
>     [0-9] 
> 
> By preceding the dash with a backslash:
> 
>     [0\-9]
> 
> we have broken the dash out of its normal meaning and it just becomes
> a meaningless character. The regex now says zero, dash, or nine.

This does work in XML Schema regular expressions, but I don't consider it
a good example, because many other implementations of regular expressions
do not support \-escaping inside character classes.  The conventional way
to write a character class meaning "zero, dash, or nine" is either
"[09-]" or "[-09].

A better example would be "a*", which means "zero or more 'a' characters",
whereas "a\*" means "an 'a' character followed by an '*' character".

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know