Re: Implementing " and ' in literals

[Matt Sergeant <matt at sergeant dot org>]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, David Carlisle wrote:

> 
> 
> > Actually using C style backslash escaping would be rejected by other
> > parsers, I believe. So that's probably a better long term solution (and
> > it's prettier too!).
> 
> Why would they be rejected? \ isn't a special character to xpath or xml
> so \" would just be the two characters. Adding a quote character such as
> \ just makes it harder to query attributes that have \ in their values
> as you have to double quote the \. This seems far mor common than
> wanting to make a literal string that has both " and ' in it.

Take the following: 'It\'s a nice day'

Most (all?) XPath tokenizers simply use the following regular expression:

'[^']*'

Which with the above, would stop at 'It\', followed by a single NCName
token "s" which would cause a syntax error.

-- 
<Matt/>

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