The reasons are the same as for HTML parsing really. Your regular expression will do what you want it to do, probably, and then you'll come to trust it and it will come back to bite you when you meet an unexpected case.
Does it:
- ignore code which is commented out?
- allow for attribute order changing?
- cope with the characters < and > appearing inside attributes, or CDATA sections?
There are probably a hundred more things you'd have to think of to make your regular expression solution bullet-proof, by which time you might as well have written your own XML parser.
Nobody says perl looks like line-noise any more
kids today don't know what line-noise IS ...
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|
