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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T11:35:46+00:00

Here’s an XML sample: <Search ID=Blah input=Some search line1=first line of result line2=second line

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Here’s an XML sample:

<Search ID="Blah"
        input="Some search"
        line1="first line of result"
        line2="second line of result"
        line3="third line of result"
        />

The attributes named line1 to line3 are optional and unbound – a given search element could have line attributes all the way up to line99 or something (realistically never higher than 2 digits). Is there any way of specifying a pattern of acceptable attribute names in an XML Schema so that I could validate this, without manually specifying all optional attribute names up to whatever I actually use?

Ideally I would like something along the lines of:

<xs:attribute name="line[0-9][0-9]" type="xs:string" use="optional" />

in the schema definition.

I suspect this is not possible, but all of the searches I do to try and find out for sure end up finding ways of using patterns on the actual values of the attributes, not their names, so if someone could please confirm whether this is possible or not, that would be great.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No, that is not possible. If you read the XML specification on attribute declarations, you’ll notice that attribute names are of type NCName, which excludes the [and ]characters.

    On another note, it is a very strange use of attributes to convey the result of a query. A much more natural format would be

    <search id="..." input="...">
    <result>
       <line nr="1">bla bla</line>
       <line nr="2">more bla bla</line>
       ...
       <line nr="99">extra bla</line>
    </result>
</search>
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