no, this is one of the worst answers on Stack Overflow
OP had a specific question to capture opening tags. The thing OP asked about can be done with regular expressions. It is true that arbitrarily nested languages like HTML cannot generally be parsed with regular expressions, but that is not what OP asked about.
It can be done with simple regex of the kind proposed in various answers there iff the html is known to be limited to the subset of html where that sort of thing can easily be made to work. The question does not tell us whether or not that is the case, so everyone is free to make their own assumptions and argue as if they know what’s going on.
It can’t be done, as an opening tag in html can contain anything in its attributes, even JavaScript (e.g. onclick handler).
You can’t parse every html opening tag with regex, because a html opening tag doesn’t have a set structure. How would you match, with regex, this opening tag?
<mytag myattribute="<value of \"myattribute\">" >
This is StackOverflow after all. Your question is wrong. Your problem is wrong. You are wrong. I am right. Thread locked. Go read this other post that is totally unrelated to your problem I’ve decided isn’t the problem you’re facing because. I. Am. Right.
Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:
Hey, I see you’re having problems with <copy-paste key words from OP>. Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.
Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".
I hope this helps!
(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)
answers.mirosoft.com is the worst. learn.microsoft.com can be decent at times though
xpath <3
Using a regex on html is like eating wild mushrooms that you found in the woods. There are times where it’s appropriate and safe, other times where it’s completely insane and possibly deadly, and it takes considerable experience to know how to tell the difference.
I once applied to an internship for a company doing job offers aggregation. During the interview they explained to me that the core of what they did was parsing (partial) html with regex. When I asked why they wouldn’t develop a custom parser, they replied to me that they were working on it, but that the internship wouldn’t focus on that. I was not disappointed when it didn’t get the job.
OP isn’t trying to parse HTML though… they are trying to detect opening xml tags. Which seems quite achievable with regex.
It’s still actually pretty sketchy, depending on exactly what you want to do. Strict regex still won’t be able to match correctly if you want to match what an HTML parser considers the opening tag, though fancier regex will. If you’re just looking for the tags in the HTML document as a flat document it’s doable, though. (Mostly.)
