You can't parse HTML with Regex

[Mark Wieder]

Jacque-

I'm partial to Jeff Atwood's writeup on this

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-the-cthulhu-way.html

...including the comments...

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Turing-complete is a stronger computational class than that of a
type-2 grammar (Which is, IIRC, a pushdown automaton - regexs are
nondeterministic finite state machines), so it's not really surprising
that you can parse HTML with regular expressions + glue code in Perl
or whatever, but it's still not really a good idea compared to writing
a proper recursive-descent parser.

JamesP on November 17, 2009 9:05 AM

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You can do whatever you like, even if it seems stupid, but only if you
do it well.

Kapusta on November 17, 2009 9:25 AM 

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net