From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2005-10-11T22:43:58+09:00
Subject: Re: help with htree

On Oct 11, 2005, at 7:15 AM, Ara.T.Howard wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Gavin Kistner wrote:
>> Notable flaw - will fail if the same element is nested within itself.
>
> a big flaw for parsing hierarchical text no?  ;-)

Certainly, if your input is likely to have such. It would be illegal  
for a pre to appear inside a pre tag, and simply unlikely (in my  
world) to find nested <b> or <i> tags.

I'm a huge fan of clean structured markup. However (precisely because  
it is so clean) I often find my screen-scraping activities can be  
achieved more quickly by using a simple "look everywhere" regexp on a  
structured document, compared to loading the document into REXML  
(I've not used/seen htree) and using DOM/XPath to find the  
appropriate node. There are gobs of cases where this isn't the case,  
but it has been for a lot of simple cases.

Anyhow - glad you have a current working solution, and good luck with  
htree.