Re: Bug in Apache::ASP XMLSubs when an argument includes '>'-characte rs?

[Joshua Chamas <jo...@chamas.com>]

Henrik Tougaard wrote:
> 
> > XML attributes can't contain "<" or "&" characters, or the
> > same quote that
> > they are surrounded by. The following are the encodings you can use
> > (and XMLSubsMatch needs to unravel):
> >
> > <   =>  "&lt;"
> > >   =>  "&gt;"
> > &   =>  "&amp;"
> > "   =>  "&quot;"
> > '   =>  "&apos;"
> >
> > Note that only "<" is needed for your example (since encoding the
> > ">" isn't mandatory in XML generally).
> >
> Well this does limit the usefullness of the XMLSubs feature.
> I had hoped that it would be possbile to use any perl expression in
> the attributes - as an easy way of giving arguments to the perl-sub.
> 

I think > is just about the only thing that you can't use as
a character in the attributes for an XMLSubs and that's because
it gets parsed with an aggressive ( or stupid ;) regexp like:

	$$data =~ s|\<\s*($self->{xml_subs_match})([^\>]*)/\>

So basically what its doing is looking for everything up
to the first > so to put that in the data pretty well kills
it.  The arguments are further evaluated from there as $2.
Its simple and fast, and would be really good to keep it 
this way.  

Note that XMLSubs attributes can be most valid perl expressions,
but I don't think > could be supported in this context either.

Another related XMLSubs attribute issue came up recently
where it was hard to quote the @ character because in perl
"some@email" will error usually, and the quick fix for this
is to have an argument with single quotes like email='some@email'

Internally an XMLSubs attribute will go from 
  <my:tag email='some@email' range=10 />
to something like
  &my::tag(email => 'some@email', range => 10)

-- Joshua

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