Re: [xml-dev] Parsing XML with anything but

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 23:10 -0500, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> Hey, Liam!
> 
> On Mon, 09 Dec 2013 22:07:09 -0500, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> > The "desperate perl hacker" was a significant and much-discussed use
> > case during XML development, and was part of why we chose a self-evident
> > empty element syntax.
> 
> Mmmmm. I suggest that you didn't succeed. XML, in the general case, 
> cannot be reliably handled with regular expressions.

But I didn't say that I wrote a parser or that I handled the general
case.

(you can, by the way, use Perl's extended regular expressions to parse
XML reliably, because they can handle nesting correctly, but that's
another matter and not what I'm doing).

> Developing a library of regular expressions that handles a series of 
> special cases in XML is a good way of falling prey to the classic Perl 
> programmer's virtue of hubris. That code may be safe in your own 
> (desperate hackish) hands; it isn't safe in someone else's.

I'm not going to get into personal attacks based on weak assumptions.

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml