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A comment on Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia. Parent comment

Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by shakna on Monday April 23, 2018 @05:36AM (#16901883)
Oh, I know. The markup is incomprehensible, but not to a render engine. It doesn't even seem to impact loading speed. It generates amazing machine-text.

As for scraping... Parsing the hell that is wikitext is all you can do. Or apparently, pipe it through a text browser.

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Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by saagarjha on Monday April 23, 2018 @05:44AM (#16901912)
> pipe it through a text browser

That's an interesting idea, and one that I hadn't thought of, but I'd place it closer to matching HTML with regex than actual "parsing". I might use it if I'm really desperate though.

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