alt Hacker News> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't
I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
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It took me years to notice, but did you catch that the answer actually subtly misinterprets what the question is asking for?
Guy (in my reading) appears to talk about matching an entire HTML document with regex. Indeed, that is not possible due to the grammars involved. But that is not what was being asked.
What was being asked is whether the individual HTML tags can be parsed via regex. And to my understanding those are very much workable, and there's no grammar capability mismatch either.
I know this is grumpy but this I’ve never liked this answer. It is a perfect encapsulation of the elitism in the SO community—if you’re new, your questions are closed and your answers are edited and downvoted. Meanwhile this is tolerated only because it’s posted by a member with high rep and username recognition.
HE COMES
Funny how differently people can perceive things. That's my least favorite SO answer of all time, and I cringe every time I see it.
It's a very bad answer. First of all, processing HTML with regex can be perfectly acceptable depending on what you're trying to do. Yes, this doesn't include full-blown "parsing" of arbitrary HTML, but there are plenty of ways in which you might want to process or transform HTML that either don't require producing a parse tree, don't require perfect accuracy, or are operating on HTML whose structure is constrained and known in advance. Second, it doesn't even attempt to explain to OP why parsing arbitrary HTML with regex is impossible or poorly-advised.
The OP didn't want his post to be taken over by someone hamming it up with an attempt at creative writing. He wanted a useful answer. Yes, this answer is "quirky" and "whimsical" and "fun" but I read those as euphemisms for "trying to conscript unwilling victims into your personal sense of nerd-humor".
I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.