Preventing line breaks in <code> elements | Hacker News Reader

Preventing line breaks in <code> elements

alexwlchan.net

14 pointssurprisetalk21 comments

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.

You can parse a subset of it though, like if you're in control of the html yourself and avoid certain structures

Parsing HTML with a regex is never a good option, but it's sometimes the only option.

In the example from the article it certainly is an option. In Python you could either use a "soup" library or you could play around with a tool like https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/man1/hxpipe.html.

The more fundamental question for me is why the author didn't decide to make make code blocks non-breaking by default, or just add the class annotations when he writes the HTML?

Tony the pony, he comes.

What do you mean you can't. I do it all the time

You do some parts all the time.

As the saying goes: you can fool all people some of the time, and some people all of the time.

Actually, depending on what you're doing, it can be totally fine. Just be aware that you're losing some generality.

You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length. Every finite language is regular, hence can be parsed with regex's.

Do a web search for the parent of your comment, read the Stackoverflow answer. It's a classic. Learn about Zalgo and Tony the pony, he comes.

Zalgo and situational subset parsing aside:

> You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length

This isn't sufficient, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. It's not enough to have documents of finite length (all documents are finite in length), you need documents with a max length, so you have a finite number of possible documents to parse.

and you write your regex specifically for that document length, handling all possible nesting combinations. combinatoric explosion

Some commenters are missing that this is a reference to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454.

Good ol' appeal to emotion devoid of technical argument.

> Locked. There are disputes about this answer’s content being resolved at this time [sic]

And also

> Nov, 2020

And then, StackOverflow asks itself why it looses users.

The answer is actually from 2009. As long as HTML/XML doesn’t suddenly become a regular language, I think it’s pretty timeless.

It's a 17 year old joke, maybe one of the most famous on stackoverflow for the aging engineers out there. No one wants new "funny" edits on it.

I do not count substitution as "parsing"

Why even bother with the CSS class? Just apply text-wrap: nowrap; to all <code> elements and dispense with the fragile regex parsing.

Unfortunately this makes it much harder to read on narrow-width screens (e.g. mobile), where the use must scroll horizontally

The 5 cm example had a line break between the 5 and the cm when I read the page in my phone. A joke?

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