You can't parse [X]HTML with regex (2009)

Re:You can't parse [X]HTML with regex (2009) by josefx on Friday March 05, 2021 @09:00AM (#26356922)

Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?" Or do avoid going onto irrelevant tangents that get you labeled as crazy and just tell them the current time?

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Re:You can't parse [X]HTML with regex (2009) by IgorPartola on Friday March 05, 2021 @09:21AM (#26357136)

What time is it isn’t an invalid question. “How do I make my hamster grow wings and fly?” is. How to parse HTML with a RegEx is an in-between. For a specialized case, why not? Answer that question, then provide a counter example to show how it will be very fragile, then explain the theory, then show a better way. IME that tends to work better to teach someone what you think they should know.

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Re:You can't parse [X]HTML with regex (2009) by jasode on Friday March 05, 2021 @09:55AM (#26357461)

>Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?"

Maybe you're (inadvertently) making a caricature by using a simple "what time is it?" question but many user questions are under-specified.

Because of that, Stackoverflow answerers in particular do go into the extra complexities because it's part of its editorial DNA to restate the q&a so it's a high-quality community knowledgebase instead of just answering the direct question as stated. I tried to explain this hard-to-grasp nuance previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438

But sometimes, this X-Y problem editorializing mechanism gets so enthusiastic that it can detract from a correct answer. Here's a famous example of a string bytes extraction question with smart people arguing with the correct answers from user541686 (was Mehrdad) and Michael Buen:

+ correct answer has lots of X-Y pushback in the comments: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-co...

+ another correct answer from Buen that emphasizes user541686/Mehrdad works for broken unpaired surrogates: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-co...

The meta layer issue is that the question is underspecified which causes 2 sides with very intelligent people arguing whether or not it's an X-Y problem!

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Re:You can't parse [X]HTML with regex (2009) by shawnz on Friday March 05, 2021 @10:47AM (#26358114)

I think the top answer in your example is highly misleading and deserves to have the caveats highlighted more clearly even though it's not "wrong". It is saying, "you don't need to worry about encoding", but really the point it is proving is "if you just use ONLY toCharArray and BlockCopy on ONLY one system and framework version then you can be sure they always use the same encoding as one another, so in that situation you don't need to worry".

So, the solution works, but only in specific situations which are not clearly explained and might be totally unrelated from OP's situation, and furthermore it doesn't really address the second part of OP's question "why take encoding into consideration?" I wouldn't necessarily call the problems with that answer just "XY pushback".

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