You can't parse XML with regex. Let's do it anyways
10 hours ago
- #XML
- #regex
- #scraping
- XML parsing with regex is generally discouraged due to XML's complexity and irregular structure.
- HTML is more lenient than XML but still challenging to parse correctly due to quirks and edge cases.
- Regex can be useful for scraping specific data from HTML/XML when full parsing is unnecessary.
- Key benefits of regex for scraping include development speed and adaptability to minor markup changes.
- Practical tips for regex scraping include using PCRE for non-greedy matching and anchoring to unique text.
- A sample bash script demonstrates scraping version and download data from a webpage using regex techniques.
- The post concludes that while regex isn't suitable for proper XML parsing, it can be effective for targeted data extraction.