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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • A very good list of truisms. However, there is the subtlest of subtle flaws in this list -- all categorical statements (including this one) are false. For example:

    Don't parse XML with regular expressions.

    Sometimes you do want to parse XML with regexes, but only in the most controlled of circumstances. Usually this involves munging huge quantities of data that are very rigidly formatted. If you can fully control the structure of XML inputs, and you tend to be reading inputs line-by-line (or bloc

    • It is possible to parse arbitrary XML with regular expressions. However, it can't be done line-by-line because tags can contain newlines. It must be done on the whole file (or have some smart buffering).

      There is a paper, http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html [cs.sfu.ca], which develops the regex for parsing XML.

      • Note that those patterns parse simple XML, not XML with namespaces. Parsing XML with namespaces purely using pattern matching is probably possible too, but it’d be a whole hell of a lot harder, and the patterns would be nasty monstrosities far more so than the managable beasts from that paper.

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