On Jan 13, 2004, at 4:09 AM, Graham Samuel wrote:
> I am using this to infer what XML is and what it's for - I know, this > was not Alex's intention when writing his post, but in fact it takes > me quite a long way.
It was my intent, more or less :-)
> However the question I can't tackle intuitively from the sample is > "how would I define and populate my XML tree - or whatever it's called > - faced with the text of 'Macbeth'?", and maybe "How general could > such a parser/populator be? Once constructed - presumably with some > set of rules - could I use it on 'Hamlet'?" I suppose the answer to > the second question has got to be "Yes" provided the range of syntax > and punctuation of the two plays is broadly the same (**exactly** the > same?). Still looking for that type of guidance - tho of course > strictly this is OT to RunRev: for which I crave your indulgence, my > Lords.
I found the XML ready-made on the web. Most likely it was written by hand someone typing in the XML markup, or using an XML editor to type it in.
If not, if it was actually parsed from some other format into XML, undoubtedly regular expressions were used. Something like
repeat for each line tLine of Macbeth if matchText(tLine, "Speaker:(.+)$", tSpeaker) revAddXMLNode(tDocID, tParent, "speaker", tSpeaker) end if -- etc for speech, stagedir, etc, etc. end repeat
Sorry, this really has got OT now, so I'll shut up after this, but I'm still looking to make sense of a phrase like "typing in the XML markup". I'm feeling my way to the idea that XML is a bit like HTML (or even SGML if I knew what that was), which allows you to represent a structured text (or maybe something other than a text) using a restricted character set via a system of tags. Maybe the trick with XML is that you have meta-tags, as with Humpty Dumpty - " 'When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'. "
If this is the case, I see that I can invent a structure for representing a Shakespeare play, but of course I can only **use** a populated structure of this kind if I understand the tags, so somehow the 'meaning' must be contained within the text. Muddling. I will search the Internet some more, next time I have a moment.
Graham
---------------------------------------------------
Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France
_______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
