On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 15:02, Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:I think Peter is right. It would be nice to have an interpreter for each of the common file formats, and XML is just the biggest one.
On 24 Nov 2004 09:16:03 +0000, Peter Foldiak
<peter.foldiak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
I would really like to implement this for the next version of Hans' fileI don't undersand how you want to use Xpath for not XML file.
system.
I agree with you that the idea behind Xpath is cool but I fail to
unserstand how it can be applied to anything but XML
My message was mainly about XML, for which it is easy.
For non-XML, you need some other way of knowing the file format. The
example that originally came up in this thread was
/etc/passwd/[username]
In this case, the passwd file has a known format.
Other file types, like LaTex, html, jpeg also have (at least partially)
known formats. Some selection should be possible even for unknown
formats (e.g. byte range, line-range). There could also be some way of
specifying a new format but I don't know how to do this well. You could
give names (like filenames) to parts of files.
But I think the first step would be to concentrate on XML, and worry
about the rest later. Peter