xpath <3
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.
SO in a nutshell:
“I need to do X”
“Have you tried Y?”
“No, because I don’t need Y, I need X.”
“Well you can do Z if you can’t do Y.”
“OK, sure. But how do I do X?”
“Why do you need to do X?”
(Explains why in my hyper-specific situation, I need to do X, and Y and Z won’t work)
This question has been marked as a duplicate of “How to do Y”
Except in 99% of cases the person is asking an xy problem, and if they ever explained the why, they would get a proper answer.
Often the reason no one does the hyper-specific thing, is that there are better non code solutions, it’s massively insecure, or is just stupid micromanaging.
You know, when I typically ask a question on SO, its because I want to learn how that thing works, or how to write it myself. I usually say as much, but the SO folks are too focused on the ends, they completely neglect the means. Chances are I’m already aware of that no-code solution, but that’s not what I’m asking for.
Which is fine when people do not reject the answers that are different from what they were expecting. Learning that the problem you have is a reason that noone does this, is a valid thing to learn.
It’s usually when I see people moving the goal posts on replies, or complaining that they didn’t answer the exact question that i see as frustrating. Or “I don’t want to do that” with no more info.
But if you are aware of other solutions, you should state that in the question and give your reasons. It’s a waste of time if you know someone might suggest what you have dismissed already.
The html question is a classic for this, they want to find non self closed tags. Why? Why can’t they use a parser? What are they doing with this info? All questions that would give you a good idea on how the problem can be solved. Playing with regex would be a valid answer to that, but is not stated. Unfortunately I find so’s format discourages extra interrogation.
The answer is not an attack on the person, but a frustration at the people before that ignored previous answers to use a parser.
and if they ever explained the why, they would get a proper answer.
That’s funny, every time I’ve explained in detail why my question isn’t a duplicate nobody fucking cares and it still gets closed.
More like:
- How can I do X?
- Marked as duplicate of “How can I do Y?”
Edit: I’ve got insomnia and don’t have my glasses on and misread the end.
Always start SO questions with X/Y problem pre-empting
These people are everywhere and will stop at nothing to make you click on one of these
https://xyproblem.info/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444353 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
They are trying to derail your question, which was already a generalized version of what your actual question was. And of course, you would need to explain everything you generalized out of your question (which would probably all get deleted by someone editing your question and removing all the irrelevant facts) by which point your question becomes so complicated nobody can answer it, even though they could have answered the generalized version.
My advice, just use chatgpt or mistral, 99% you will get a better answer than stackoverflow. And you will get this actionnable answer IMMEDIATELY !
So all the misery in the world is related to webdevs trying to parse html with regex?
You bastards.
Once you learn about parser combinators, all other parsing looks pretty dopey.
There is a famous Erik Naggum rant about XML at, no wait, I better not link it but you can find it with a search engine if you want, which means you don’t get to complain to me about it since you are the one who went looking for it. Very NSFW and VERY politically incorrect. Naggum died in 2009 but anyone who published a thing like that today would be raked over the coals.
OP isn’t trying to parse HTML though… they are trying to detect opening xml tags. Which seems quite achievable with regex.
