Re: Re: Re: How to use Regular Expressions with HTML

[tomhukins]

I finished reading Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building today. Alexander writes about architecture, but his ideas, such as patterns, have been adopted by software developers.

Your list above (use strict, don't reinvent the wheel, etc.) is basically a list of Perl patterns, practices that should exist in well written programs.

Although we learn good habits by following rules, we ultimately derive those rules from observing what we find good. Patterns, or best practice, summarise our experiences and allow us to share them with others.

In his last chapter, Alexander notes that another place can be without the patterns which apply to it, and yet still be alive: we should follow the spirit of the rules we lay down, not the letter. So paradoxically you learn that you can only make a building live when you are free enough to reject even the very patterns which are helping you once you understand the patterns well.

Tim Bray uses Perl's regular expressions to parse XML and you use regexps to parse HTML. I don't anticipate doing either any time soon, because the general problems I encounter fit the solution of using existing CPAN modules, and because I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough about such things to break the rules yet.