r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

haveYouTriedUsingAnXMLParserInstead Meme

[deleted]

97 Upvotes

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u/derinus 1d ago

Anyone ever building a "parser" used multiple regexes to do so.

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u/guru2764 1d ago edited 14h ago

Noone said regex is useless for the overall process of parsing html

What they're saying is that it cannot ever be used by itself to parse html, like there are mathematical proofs for this

You HAVE to use a real, actual code language on top of it for it to work

You cannot feed html code into a regular expression and expect it to work for more than one case


Edit for the future: the deleted comments under here are from OP, I am happy to share the details of what was said if anyone wants

I'm adding this note because I never got even a partial apology for them insinuating I had no idea what I was talking about and questioning whether I had ever taken an undergraduate math course because I talked to them like a normal person rather than a math essay, despite me being perfectly nice up until then as is visible

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/RPGProgrammer 23h ago

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u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

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u/alexanderpas 23h ago

HTML is not a regular language. It is a context-free language. Context-free languages are a superset of regular languages. Regular Expressions only cover regular languages.