From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2006-03-08T04:36:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Is there link extractor or similar html processing libs for Ruby

From: "James Edward Gray II" <james@grayproductions.net>
> >
> > You meant something like this ? (quite dirty but works)
> >
> > puts open("some.html").read.scan(/<a href="?(.+?)"?>/)
> 
> No, it doesn't, trust me.  ;)  Toss a simple "\n" in there and you're  
> sunk:
> 
> <a
>   href="whatever">
> 
> Parsing HTML is hard and you don't want to use regular expressions to  
> do it.

Hi, not trying to be argumentative, just surprised.  I thought parsing HTML 
with regexps was pretty easy.  Well, lexing HTML into tokens, I mean.

Since there are no recursive structures (that I know of) in the syntax for
an open or closing tag, it seemed reasonably well suited to regexps to me.

 . . . . Heheh, or maybe the passage of time has given the memories a
rosy glow.  I just looked up the last HTML lexer I wrote, 5 years ago, 
and it's 19 lines of regexp.  Admittedlly it's a very clean 19 lines, but still,
lengthier than I remembered....  :)


Regards,

Bill