[osis-core] Use of "+" in grain of a reference.

[Patrick Durusau]

Todd,

The general structure of the grain for character references is:

grain ::= 'char:' offset length? content
offset ::= integer
length ::= '+' integer
content ::= '(' [^0]+ ')'
integer ::= [0-9]+

The '+' sign is just a separator character. (Steve, didn't XPointer use 
a comma?)

Look at Steve's post on 9 May 2002, subject line Pointer syntax.

I have discussed this with Steve and the intent is to be able to point to:

1. a particular location, i.e., just the offset

2. a particular range of characters, offset+length

3. a particular range of characters, offset+lenth and then to a 
particular word in that range (at least that is how I read it)

(Don't know that I want to complicate the regex any more but I suspect 
that the text string would be more useful if it were match on this ref, 
then find this string and not have string as part of offset and length. 
If I know that much detail, why do I need the string? (Steve, can you 
help out here?)

Patrick


Todd Tillinghast wrote:

>And I did not use the "+" behavior?  It seems to indicate a range or
>characters rather than a point.  When referring to a segment of a verse
>it would seem the only appropriate value following the "+" would be the
>number of characters in the segment not the number of characters in the
>first word in the segment.  
>
>Have I missed the boat on the "+"? 
>Is it to help parse the word in parentheses?  If this is the purpose
>would it be more "third normal" to just count the characters of the word
>in parentheses?
>
>Is there a reason to not remove the "+"?
>
>Todd
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu