The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer

Tag: regex

XSL vs. Regular Expressions

Posted by bsstahl on 2006-05-21 and Filed Under: development 


I had an interesting discussion today with a colleague on the use of XSL vs. Regular Expressions. During the course of the conversation, I broke the process of translation down into 3 steps; pattern recognition, data interpretation, and data mapping. XSL excels at all 3 of these tasks, while Regular Expressions can do all 3, but excels primarily at pattern recognition. The result of the conversation was that Regular Expressions should be used in situations where only pattern recognition needs to be done, such as in data validation (i.e. does this string look like an email address) and would be excellent for when only 1 item of data needs to be interpreted (i.e. Grab the email address from this string and do something with it). When multiple data items need to be interpreted and mapped, then XSL is clearly the better choice. Also, XSL is almost always the proper solution when the data is in XML format and is to stay in XML format.

Tags: xml regex 

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Barry S. StahlBarry S. Stahl (he/him/his) - Barry is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers since the mid 1980s. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 40 year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana in Tempe AZ and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp event where software creators come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.

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