Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplecats | Hacker News Reader

brilliant. does this spin up a heavy DOM implementation in the background or do something lighter such as regexp?

You can't parse html with regular expressions :)

"Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML!"

Yeah, if you allow yourself some Perl to help you with those parts that regexes can't handle...

Technically correct, but did you see the regex he uses? It spans 82 lines...

And the obligitory caveat from the comments:

> While arbitrary HTML with only a regex is impossible, it's sometimes appropriate to use them for parsing a limited, known set of HTML.

The emphasis here is on "known". The tool is general purpose (i.e. handling unknown HTML) so using regexes would be ill-advised.

Looks like it uses servos html5ever (through kuchiki), so no DOM representation.

Kuchiki materialises what they call a “DOM-like tree”. I’d consider it a DOM tree, myself, despite the differences in precise API.

But it’s not using a full browser to back it, which I suspect is what’s really being asked.

It looks to be using html5ever to parse the HTML, similar to something like BeautifulSoup in Python.

The source is right there. You can read it. It uses html5ever (part of the servo project).

You can’t parse HTML with regexps. It’s not a regular language.

What language implements regexps that actually correspond to regular languages though?