Ask YC: basic text parser?

1 pointunalone4 comments

I'm working on designing a form for submitting large blocks of text, and out of curiosity: is there a basic text parser for breaking up lines and processing HTML? Or is that something that you feel just ought to be made from scratch?

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What programming language? if Python is an option Beautiful Soup could be one alternative for HTML parsing.

I am not much of a programmer. I love designing things, I love layouts, I love figuring out the mechanics behind a system. That said, I'm ignorant with various languages and what does what. Is it possible to use Python to parse a web page? I'm woefully ignorant where stuff like that is concerned.

regexp?

I second that, pcre.

It's a horrible horrible API but you can free-ride features like UTF-8 and Unicode support.

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