Re: How to work with XML data using System Events?
Re: How to work with XML data using System Events?
- Subject: Re: How to work with XML data using System Events?
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 17:48:00 -0500
On 11/3/05,
has <
email@hidden> wrote:
Important
caveat: scraping XML data with regexes may be a popular approach
amongst some folks, but it is a total cowboy hack and such solutions
are very brittle and liable to break unless the XML data's structure is
fairly simple and totally predictable, and its encoding known in
advance. You'll always be far safer using a proper XML parser or a
higher-level XML processing tool such as XPath, especially if you're
not aware of all the pitfalls involved.
Absolutely. Regular expressions are so called because they are
inherently capable of parsing a set of languages called "regular
languages". XML is not a regular language; it, along with most
programming languages, is part of a superset of regular languages
called "context-free languages" which require more sophisticated
computational models than that provided by regular expressions.
Modern regular _expression_ engines include features that make them more
powerful than pure regular expressions, and with appropriate code
written around the regexes you can perform some pretty impressive
parsing tricks, but for XML it's much cleaner to go with an actual XML
parsing engine instead. Which is why even the XML parsing
modules written for Perl usually go that route.
--
Mark J. Reed <
email@hidden>
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