From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2009-02-11T06:46:37+09:00
Subject: Re: regexp problem

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On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Igor Pirnovar <gooigpi@gmail.com> wrote:

> Rick Denatale wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 3:19 AM, William James wrote:
> >
> > As 7Stud pointed out, a toolbox with only regular expressions
> > inside is often a poor choice for dealing with xml/html
> >
> > Here's a rather verbose and commented program using a
> > combination of hpricot and a regular expression to do
> > something like what I think you are looking for:
> >
> > require 'rubygems'
> > require 'hpricot'
> > . . .
> >
> > When run this outputs: ["123313"]
> >
> > In other words it produces an array of strings representing
> > the target numbers in a script tag within a td tag which
> > follows another td tag whose inner text is "Traffic left:"
>
> Rick, your solution is swell, and it is probably worth while considering
> by someone whose day job is parsing html/xml documents. However, purely
> from a language and/or from a programmer's perspective William's
> solution is far more appealing,


subjective.


> much shorter,


certainly, particularly with my pedagogical comments,

easier to understand and


I'd be quite willing to argue that.

>
> requires virtually no additional learning effort.


Yes, we wouldn't want to expend any unnecessary effort on learning would we.

And by the way to get that to work (in Ruby 1.8) a nuby rubyist would have
to learn that you'd need to include 'enumerable' to get the cons method.


> It nullifies or
> "flattens" the comment started out by 7Stud that you also elevated to an
> undeserving height.
>

You can treat regular expressions as a Maslovian hammer, but I've had enough
experiences with  xml to realize that that hammer is often a very poor tool
for parsing html.  I'd rather expend my learning budget in learning how to
apply a tool like Hpricot than to debug my own low-level attempts.

But, as they say, to each his own.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale

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