I'm struggling with something that should be trivial: I'm using Saxon 9 and processing text and want to match a character of arbitrary value such as 255 in a regular expression. I just can't figure out how to express it!

I'm trying something like <xsl:analyze-string select="$text" regex="blah([^#xff]*)blah">. I've tried stuff like \u and \x without any luck.

So far the only successful solution I've found is to find the printable unicode character, like 'ÿ' for 0xFF and copy-paste it into my XSLT.

How am I supposed to do this with XPath 2.0 or saxon or whatever is constraining me from using the multi-character escapes I know from other dialects of regular expressions?

Ian

Use & # x f f ; (without the spaces) just as you would anywhere else in an XML document where you need to write a special character. The only restriction is that you can't use characters that aren't allowed in XML.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference