My regex at work is full of (<[^>]+\s*){0,5} because we don’t care about 90 percent of the attributes. All we care is it’s class=“data I want” and eventually take me to that data.
That’s perfectly valid HTML, but you wouldn’t want to pull that link out, and POSIX regex can’t really avoid it. At least not with just a single regex. Imagine a link nested within like 3 template tags.
I would argue that that is not parsing. That’s just pattern matching. For something to be parsing a document, it would have to have some “understanding” of the structure of the document. Since regex is not powerful enough to correctly “understand” the document, it’s not parsing.
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I don’t think that using regex to basically do regex stuff on strings that happen to also be HTML really counts as parsing HTML
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My regex at work is full of (<[^>]+\s*){0,5} because we don’t care about 90 percent of the attributes. All we care is it’s class=“data I want” and eventually take me to that data.
Technically, regex can’t pull out every link in an HTML document without potentially pulling fake links.
Take this example (using curly braces instead of angle brackets, because html is valid markdown):
{template id="link-template"} {a href="javascript:void(0);"}link{/a} {/template}That’s perfectly valid HTML, but you wouldn’t want to pull that link out, and POSIX regex can’t really avoid it. At least not with just a single regex. Imagine a link nested within like 3 template tags.
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I would argue that that is not parsing. That’s just pattern matching. For something to be parsing a document, it would have to have some “understanding” of the structure of the document. Since regex is not powerful enough to correctly “understand” the document, it’s not parsing.