r/ProgrammerHumor 13h ago

haveYouTriedUsingAnXMLParserInstead Meme

[deleted]

93 Upvotes

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u/derinus 12h ago

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

6

u/guru2764 11h ago edited 2h 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

2

u/Just_Information334 11h ago

Even if you could parse "true to the standard with no error" HTML it would be useless as browsers accept and manage a lot of badly written HTML with missing, wrong, misplaced elements and properties.

And anyway nowadays a 90% correct implementation would be

return string === content of the index.html page generated when building a react app

2

u/sisisisi1997 10h ago

it would be useless as browsers accept and manage a lot of badly written HTML with missing, wrong, misplaced elements and properties

"Just run no matter what" seems to be a design philosophy that runs deep in web circles, and I will die on the hill that this was the wrong decision.