EXtensions...xml processing

you always faced with "missing features" if you working with existing standards.

two reasons for that:

1. the feature is specific to your domain or solution
2. the feature is common but for some reasons (and there might be good ones) didn't get it in the existing standard

for the second case common EXtensions might be the area you looking for. in the xml domain the following projects trying to define "standard extensions". this means that extending an existing standard out of the scope of the standard process itself but without loosing the portability of applicaton using the extensions.

projects

• XPath
  => EXPath
• XSLT 1.0
  => EXSLT
• XSLT 2.0
  => see discussion about EXSLT 2.0
  
• XQuery
  => EXQuery
• XProc
  => EXProc

beside EXSLT which is well-known and already produced a sufficient amount of output all other EX communities are brand new and therefore doesn't provide any output so far.

watch and contribute......

identify content: powerful but tricky

regular expression and xpath are two approaches to identify a matching subset of content within a given amount of content for further usage. the first one based on plain text the second one based on xml.

both are powerful but if you not using it on a day by day basis are tricky and error prone. error prone means that you have to avoid all edge cases where a given expression shouldn't match but it does or the other way around where a given expression should match but it doesn't.

if you work in XML related world you often need both approaches e.g. using XSLT or XQuery.

there are few commercial IDE's which helping out to develop the right expression for the required use case but there are two which i'm often use dedicated to help you dealing either with regular expressions or xpath

SketchPath

powerful standalone tool to create and verify xpath expression. support for xpath 2.0 and most features you ask for in this context. this tool is based on well-known Saxon for xpath 2.0 and .net subsystem for xpath 1.0

home: http://pgfearo.googlepages.com/

Regulator

powerful standalone tool to create and verify regular expression. with buildin regex analyser and on-the-fly validation, code generation (for .net and vb only), ....

download: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/regulator/Regulator20Bin.zip?modtime=1189740236&big_mirror=0