XML technologies / MathML / Presentation markup / General layout elements / Fenced expressions

Fenced expressions

(Excerpt from "The MathML Handbook" by Pavi Sandhu)

The mfenced element surrounds its content with a pair of fences (such as brackets or parentheses) and automatically inserts a separator between each pair of arguments. It provides a compact way of expressing markup involving fences and separators.

Consider the following expression:

$Presentation markup: equation 18$

<mrow>
  <mi>f</mi>
  <mo>&ApplyFunction;</mo>
  <mrow>
    <mo>(</mo>
    <mi>x</mi>
    <mo>,</mo>
    <mi>y</mi>
    <mo>)</mo>
  </mrow>
</mrow>

The same expression can also be represented more compactly by the following markup:

<mrow>
  <mi>f</mi>
  <mo>&ApplyFunction;</mo>
  <mfenced><mi>x</mi><mi>y</mi></mfenced>
</mrow>

The characters used as the opening and closing fence are determined by the value of the attributes, open and close. The default values of these attributes are the opening and closing parentheses. The attribute separators determine the character used as the separator. This can be specified as a sequence of zero or more characters. If there are too many separators, the extra ones are ignored. If there are too few separators, the last one is repeated as many times as required.

Here are two more examples that show the use of these attributes:

(a + b + c)

<mfenced separator="+">
  <mi>a</mi>
  <mi>b</mi>
  <mi>c</mi>
</mfenced>

[0, 1)

<mfenced open="[">
  <mn>0</mn>
  <mn>1</mn>
</mfenced>

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