Re: [xml-dev] are the regular expressions over xml structure?

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 29/06/2012 12:47, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
>> rx = xml_re.compile('''(h1, (not h1)*)''')
>> rx.sub('''<section>\0</section>''', xml_doc)
>
> Why would anybody sacrifice the readability, maintainability and
> polymorphism/extensibility of XSLT templates for something as ugly,
> unreadable and error-prone as this?
>
Well, there are certainly cases where it would be nice to match a 
sequence of nodes that matches some pattern, rather than only matching 
individual nodes: a generalization of xsl:for-each-group. Something like:

<xsl:apply-group-templates select="body/*"/>

<xsl:group-template match="element(h1), element(p)*">
<section title="{current-group()/self::h1}">
<xsl:copy-of select="current-group()/self::p"/>
</section>
</xsl:group-template>

Michael Kay
Saxonica