Reply to thread

Message

[QUOTE="Jörg W Mittag, post: 4559962"]
Whenever someone asks me how to parse HTML with regular expressions, I
usually tell them: don't.  HTML is an extremely complex language; if
you want to parse HTML, use an HTML parser.  For example, the
following snippet is a perfectly well-formed and valid HTML document,
but none of the regexps posted in this thread so far are able to
correctly parse it:

Oh, and, no, there is nothing missing there (well, except for the
DOCTYPE declaration, I left that out for brevity -- this snippet is
valid HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.01), that is actually a complete,
well-formed and valid HTML document.

The content of the above document's body element, flattened to a
string, should be something like this: '<P>></P>'.

Using an actual HTML parser like Hpricot might be a much better
choice.  Actually, I just checked and Hpricot doesn't seem to work
either and neither does RubyfulSoup.  Strange.  What other Ruby HTML
parsers are there that I could try?

jwm
[/QUOTE]

Verification