From: ishamid <ishamid@...>
Date: 2006-12-03T04:05:05+09:00
Subject: Re: search and replace

Thank you, David, for your pointers. I'm still very much a novice (at
the level of Chris Pine's Learn to Program) so I could not follow them
all, but I do hope to learn more fast. I just sent a follow-up with
more detail, including the script I'm trying to modify; I hope you have
a chance to look at it...

Thank you again
Idris

On Dec 2, 11:15 am, David Vallner <d...@vallner.net> wrote:

> Regexps and XML always tend to blow up for me. The pattern you're
> searching for seems to be a complete element, why not use <insert XML
> parser of choice> and XPath?
>
> With REXML, it should be something like:
>
> document.elements.each('//text:sequence') {|sequence|
> sequence.replace_with(REXML::Text.new("\\head\n", true))}
>
> Substitute the XPath expression with one of desired precision. I'm a
> little unsure around how REXML treats namespaces in XPath and such, but
> if you know what prefix will be used in the document, that should work out.
>
> The script might also require a little more massaging if you're
> outputting to plaintext, but treating XML like, well, XML might get the
> heavy lifting of searching for patterns in it done faster if you use a
> pattern language operating on the DOM structure directly.