From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2008-07-31T05:43:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Suggestions for improving a trivial tag parser

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Robert Dober <robert.dober@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Rolando Abarca <funkaster@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 30-07-2008, at 13:53, Robert Dober wrote:
>>
>>> What about
>>>
>>> eles = split( %r{(</?.*?>)} ).delete_if{|x| x.empty? }
>>> eles.size.one? ? eles.first : eles
>>
>> I think your regexp is wrong, since it (incorrectly) parses empty tags:
> It passed the specs did it not? I did not know what Gregory wanted
> exactly, turns out he wanted %r{(</?[ib]>)}
> but he got the message ;).

My implementation was tighter than my specs, but I added an extra one
to catch this. :)

> It would be different if we were treating files, but as the string is
> already here we use the memory required by the
> specification and nothing more.

It does a double pass through the segments rather than a single pass,
and I guess that if I had a giant string with a ton of tags I needed
to parse, that'd make it less efficient.

However, I think it'll be okay for my purposes (PDF inline styling),
unless I missed some other concern Rolando had.