xmlchars

Utilities for determining whether characters belong to character classes defined by the XML specs.

Organization

It used to be that the library was contained in a single file and you could just import/require/what-have-you the xmlchars module. However, that setup did not work well for people who cared about code optimization. Importing xmlchars meant importing all of the library and because of the way the code was generated there was no way to shake the resulting code tree.

Different modules cover different standards. At the time this documentation was last updated, we had:

• xmlchars/xml/1.0/ed5 which covers XML 1.0 edition 5.
• xmlchars/xml/1.0/ed4 which covers XML 1.0 edition 4.
• xmlchars/xml/1.1/ed2 which covers XML 1.0 edition 2.
• xmlchars/xmlns/1.0/ed3 which covers XML Namespaces 1.0 edition 3.

Features

The "things" each module contains can be categorized as follows:

1. "Fragments": these are parts and pieces of regular expressions that correspond to the productions defined in the standard that the module covers. You'd use these to build regular expressions.

2. Regular expressions that correspond to the productions defined in the standard that the module covers.

3. Lists: these are arrays of characters that correspond to the productions.

4. Functions that test code points to verify whether they fit a production.