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From: Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Screen scraper to get all 'a title' elements
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 01:53:26 +0200
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Grobu <snailcoder@retrosite.invalid>:

> Sorry, I wasn't aware of regex being on the dark side :-)

No, regular expressions are great for many purposes. Parsing
context-free syntax isn't one of them.

See:

  <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy>

Most modern programming languages including HTML are context-free. Their
structure is too rich for regular expressions to capture.

Regular expressions can handle any regular language just fine. They are
commonly used to define the lexical tokens of a language.


Marko