From: Max Maischein <corion@...>
Date: 2002-03-24T07:36:20+09:00
Subject: Re: extracting multi-line <a> tags?

Evening everybody,

[...trying to parse HTML via REs...]
> > a =~ /(<a.+?href=['"](.+?)['"].*?>)(.+?)(<\/a>)/m
>
> When Ruby's RE-Engine works a little bit like Perls, a RegEx like
> /(<a.+?href=['"]([^"']+)['"][^>]*>)(.+?)(<\/a>)/
>
> Will be faster and more efficient.
But also wrong, as it won't parse an url like this correctly :

<a href="foo's domain => here">Click here</a>

(and also some other weird stuff that I can think off). The best way IMO is
to simply parse the HTML with an HTML parser - I've ported the HTML::Parser
from Perl to Ruby, so if there is no other parser, I'll post it somewhere
for people to review/criticise.

-max