The question: How to match
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Only the 5th answer starts to actually answer the question.
Sure, it's somewhat obscured by the humorous rant, but it's not that bad an answer, either.
More to the point: I'm not sure I want to suck the humor out of everything. I agree that SO has problems, but humor and poetry are worthwhile things in otherewise serious places. It's all about quantity.
Given a specific situation, like a particular page or something, sure, regexes are still a possibility for solving the problem. The 2nd highest answer on the page details exactly that. So what is the problem? Is every single contributer obligated to artificially entertain the OP's preconceptions before giving the advice which they believe actually helps best? For example, if I were knowledgeable about XML but not regex, should I just not contribute in such a situation?
Note that the set of valid C programs is not a context-free language. Yet it's common to use a context free-based approach to parsing. You just add additional code to handle the context-sensitive aspects (such as a symbol table).
Unfortunately, a good number of users who post questions on StackOverflow have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Browsing the site, you will occasionally come across questions which are the tech equivalent of asking "Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?"
Frame challenges are a necessary part of learning, so they belong on a Q&A site. If a user doesn't want their problem to be challenged, the onus is on them to clarify in the question why their particular approach is the necessary one. It's only possible to respond with alternative solutions when the problem is not specified enough.
Note that this is a legitimate technique in UK sockets.
The live and neutral pins have a little gate over them that is retracted when you insert the earth pin, so you need to first stick a screwdriver into the earth pin in order to get your fingers into the live pin.
I'm not so sure benefit of the doubt must be earned. More like, any participant in a discussion forum must show it when answering, and do proper research before asking anything. If all questions are good questions, there's no problem. But, as you say, they really aren't. I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.
Are we trying to answer the question or to solve the problem?
Asking on SO is itself research. It is good to review the existing literature before taking contributors time, of course, but if the problem is not solved in the existing literature, then perhaps the framing issue isn't addressed by the existing literature either. In that case how could the learner know the best way to frame the problem in advance?
> I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.
This precludes the possibility that some contributors might want to address the framing problem, whereas others might want to address the specific question as asked. They may have different opinions about whether it is framed wrong at all. It also means the OP is losing karma or getting penalized for no fault of their own.
The silent majority of viewers will benefit from an answer that does both of (1) explaining why the answer is probably not what is wanted, and (2) answering the initial question _as written_ anyway, for future viewers.
Answering the question as written has the risk that any solution will be blindly applied without appreciating why the approach itself should be avoided. This is especially true for those users who see SO as a "write my code" site, and copy-paste anything in backticks.
How do you respectful tell someone you think they are mistaken? I'd rather not be pussyfooted around by someone if I'm in the role of "person who has asked a question based on a faulty assumption". Don't be rude but don't avoid trying to answer truthfully to the best of your ability.
How about "you're mistaken"?
The problem is with "You don't know what you're talking about, but I do, so let me answer your real question".
I find that perfectly fine. It was slightly disingenuous to reword it.
From what I've heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky had different views on this and Spolsky's more tolerant, "no such thing as a stupid question" approach won out within the company, but is less popular among the people who write answers.
So what?
If actually OP knows that this is bad approach, then OP will clarify that he's aware and yada yada.
What's the problem? lack of thick skin?
sometimes people who ask questions know the pitfalls but don't clarify that they know adequately because they are pressed for time. in this case those people unfortunately run the risk of being talked down to and they should accept that.
on the other hand if they have clarified adequately that they know what they're doing and they still want to do something that might seem weird then I agree it is disrespectful. Which is a thing you see often enough on StackOverflow to be notable.
The point is that the original question - as framed - was better served by saying "if you go back a step and reexamine your assumptions, you'll find there is a better path to your intended goal".
The new person has a different goal or a different set of constraints.
EDIT - which got me thinking. Maybe the "correct" thing to do is answer the original question as asked but gently point out to the person asking it that there is probably a better solution for them if only they had asked a different question.
The original question still stands and has an answer useful for other people. The original questioner has the opportunity to learn and ask the question they should have asked in the first place.
It's going to be annoying for someone - so it should at least be the person that kicked things off in the first place.
Actually I think it is a common and expected outcome that when investigating a new problem, we often get stuck in "XY problem" traps while researching the solution.
I very much value any feedback that suggests I should rethink the entire problem with a simpler model, because without experience it's hard to know what the simplest models are.
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!
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".
If you don't have that context, then the correct thing to do is to ask for more information, or say, "did you consider this", or find some other way to come up with a constructive response. You don't just assume you know what the person really wants to do and then try to mainsplain it to them.
> Have you tried using an XML parser instead?
Plus - Stack Overflow is about trying to generalize any given question to maximize it's wider usefulness.
Since when? You don't get extra points if you write stuff that doesn't concern OP's problem. Most SO problems don't get viral and get lots of upvotes from other people. From a game theory perspective, it doesn't make sense to add more to an answer than to make it the accepted one.
If you have slightly different constraints you are encouraged to open another question. Discussions are frowned upon and sometimes even interrupted by admins so you can't discuss if your situation is different from OP's situation and so could warrant a different answer.
Discussions on questions are routinely about unrelated or not-closely-related matters, and quite apart from that Stack Overflow wants to be a Q&A platform, not a discussion platform.