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Re: sxml-match bad pattern syntax
From: |
tomas |
Subject: |
Re: sxml-match bad pattern syntax |
Date: |
Tue, 28 Dec 2021 09:28:32 +0100 |
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 02:58:56AM -0500, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
>
> () <tomas@tuxteam.de>
> () Tue, 28 Dec 2021 08:19:04 +0100
>
> I /think/ the ellipsis is at a wrong place there [...]
> Haha, i know exactly how you feel.
%-)
> Ah, right! The ellipses are a tail that need to follow a head.
No, the ellipses tell the matcher that the symbol to its left acutally
stands for "zero or more of this". Consequently, you have to somehow [1]
use those ellipses on the right hand side (aka template) whenever you use
them on the left hand side (aka pattern) and vice versa.
> I guess i was confused by the documentation's use of ellipses in
> the conventional sense rather than the literal sense:
I think of the ellipses as a kind of funny Kleene star. Not really at
home in any world: in the regular world, because it isn't a star, in
the Scheme world, because it is postfix.
So, to come back on your original example,
(@ . ,attrs) ...
would match either empty (remember: zero or more) or
(@ (foo 1) (bar 2))
or
(@ (meep 1)) (@ "this ain't what we expected))
... so zero or more of (@ . stuff) where stuff stands for any
S-expression (note that it's sloppy: it will match things which aren't
lists of well-formed attribute lists [2]).
It won't match
(@ (foo 1)) (@ (bar 2)) ("rumpelstilzchen")
for example.
> Anyway, thanks to your help, i've managed to cobble together the
> following code, attached here for the benefit of future self:
[...]
Thanks. And thanks for the code :)
> Maybe it's idiomatic. Feedback on how to improve it welcome!
For the idiomatic part, I'll have to defer to those with more chevrons
;-)
Cheers
[1] Yes, some handwaving here.
[2] which isn't what you want to match, anyway. You want to match things
with one attribute list in them.
Cheers
--
t
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