Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? [closed]

ghz 1years ago ⋅ 7941 views

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One mistake I see people making over and [over again](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/457015/regular- expression-help) is trying to parse XML or HTML with a regex. Here are a few of the reasons parsing XML and HTML is hard:

People want to treat a file as a sequence of lines, but this is valid:

<tag
attr="5"
/>

People want to treat < or <tag as the start of a tag, but stuff like this exists in the wild:

<img src="imgtag.gif" alt="<img>" />

People often want to match starting tags to ending tags, but XML and HTML allow tags to contain themselves (which traditional regexes cannot handle at all):

<span id="outer"><span id="inner">foo</span></span>

People often want to match against the content of a document (such as the famous "find all phone numbers on a given page" problem), but the data may be marked up (even if it appears to be normal when viewed):

<span class="phonenum">(<span class="area code">703</span>)
<span class="prefix">348</span>-<span class="linenum">3020</span></span>

Comments may contain poorly formatted or incomplete tags:

<a href="foo">foo</a>
<!-- FIXME:
    <a href="
-->
<a href="bar">bar</a>

What other gotchas are you aware of?

Answer

Here's some fun valid XML for you:

<!DOCTYPE x [ <!ENTITY y "a]>b"> ]>
<x>
    <a b="&y;>" />
    <![CDATA[[a>b <a>b <a]]>
    <?x <a> <!-- <b> ?> c --> d
</x>

And this little bundle of joy is valid HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" [
    <!ENTITY % e "href='hello'">
    <!ENTITY e "<a %e;>">
]>
    <title>x</TITLE>
</head>
    <p id  =  a:b center>
    <span / hello </span>
    &amp<br left>
    <!---- >t<!---> < -->
    &e link </a>
</body>

Not to mention all the browser-specific parsing for invalid constructs.

Good luck pitting regex against that!

EDIT (Jörg W Mittag): Here is another nice piece of well-formed, valid HTML 4.01:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> 
<HTML/
  <HEAD/
    <TITLE/>/
    <P/>
#regex