In almost any situation, there are those who prefer maxims to thinking---ignore them. With specific regard to the odd web scrape, there are a couple of things that can be a problem. The first can be handled by tight expression bounding or by using something like Text::DelimMatch or Text::Balanced. You manage the second by vigilance---patch it when needed.

As for those who knee jerk instead of thinking, since many of them have no experience witting parsers (formal or ad hoc) they fail to see that the regex approach is a form of parsing, just without the overhead of dealing with things that don't matter.

--hsm

"Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

In reply to Re: Scraping HTML: orthodoxy and reality by hsmyers
in thread Scraping HTML: orthodoxy and reality by grinder

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