parsing html with regular expressions (tag: hilarious)

[VLSmooth]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732 ... 54#1732454

The response gets bonus points for using unicode. Here's an early snippet:

Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late.

The overwhelming response to the above prompted this amusing blog post by the author:
http://www.doxdesk.com/updates/2009.html
Now for an interesting snippet from that:

The user rating and moderation system at Stack Overflow is quite interesting. It seems almost deliberately set up like a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or perhaps one of those awful click-farming Facebook games. In its system of ‘score’ (the classic attraction of watching a number slowly get bigger) and ‘badges’ (like gaming's ‘achievements’) it is directly mimicking the reward systems of RPGs. All that's missing is the ability to Level Up and become a Level 90 lawful-evil-aligned Java-hacker, leading a party to the Lair of the ÜberSkeet for some instance-based Visual-Basic-orc-bashing.

[quantus]

The response gets bonus points for using unicode.

Everyone loves Unicode! Well, except for PHP users. But they don't count. They're probably too busy trying to parse HTML with regex anyway.