[osis-core] annotateRef: Question on whitespace

[Steven J. DeRose]

At 11:35 AM -0400 9/16/03, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>Greetings!
>
>Any comments on Todd's solution for second (or later occurrences of a word?
>
>Looks like an easy solution to me.
>
>Hope everyone is having a great day!

Funny, that's what we did in the comparable place in TEI extended 
pointers, and in XPointer at some stage.
It's clunky, but certainly easy to explain and to implement.

I kind of dislike the extra []: <reference osisRef="X.1.1@s[trouble][2]"/>

What would y'all think of <reference osisRef="X.1.1@s[trouble,2]"/>, 
where we rule out whatever punctuation we use? I know, that has it's 
own problem of looking like a match that it's not.... I can live with 
the extra brackets.

I do feel strongly, though, that we shouldn't make support for them 
optional. I'd rather make support for grains optional in its 
entirety, I think it would be less confusing. Of course, any 
optionality leads to non-interoperability......


>
>Patrick
>
>Patrick Durusau wrote:
>>Todd,
>>
>>Todd Tillinghast wrote:
>>
>>>Patrick,
>>>
>><snip>
>>
>>>
>>>What if we did not allow whitespace but allowed the user to specify the
>>>occurrence number of the match string with a default to the first
>>>occurrence.
>>>
>>>For example:
>>><verse osisID="X.1.1">The trouble with string matching is that a string
>>>can have whitespace trouble makers.</verse>
>>>
>>><reference osisRef="X.1.1@s[trouble][2]"/>
>>>where the second [#] is optional but would indicate the #th occurrence
>>>of the match string
>>>
>>
>>Hmmm, Steve and I talked about this briefly this afternoon and if 
>>we require (in the doc) that @s[ ] always be used at the lowest 
>>container, the second occurrence cases should be fairly rare.
>>
>>Still, I like your solution, support for which would be optional (?).
>>
>>One of the reasons for the @s[ ] operator was that when Steve and I 
>>were doing the grain syntax, we picked a word fairly far into a 
>>verse and then had to count the characters to reach it. :-) Made us 
>>realize the need for an alternative syntax!
>>
>>Steve? Looks like a winner to me. Hmmm, will need to redo the regex 
>>but that should not be a problem. (He said foolishly.)
>>
>>Hope you are having a great day!
>>
>>Patrick
>>
>
>
>--
>Patrick Durusau
>Director of Research and Development
>Society of Biblical Literature
>Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
>Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
>Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
>
>Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
>
>
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-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.derose.net
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@acm.org  or  steve@derose.net