In general, you can't reliably parse entire HTML or XML documents with a single regex.
You CAN, however, parse individual bits of wellformed XML out of a string using a regex. For example, you can have a regex that correctly matches a single empty element (though it won't parse individual attributes, just recognize that there are zero or more of them.) Or you can have a regex that will match an element. Or you can have a regex that matches a non-empty element that contains only text.
By combining several such regular expressions in a small number of simple functions, some of which are directly or indirectly recursive, I believe it is possible to parse well-formed XHTML in a couple of screens full of reasonably maintainable Perl code. If I'm wrong, it would be because XML allows something I'm not aware of and never use (e.g., if there were some kind of non-trivial quoting mechanism for embedding non-entity-ized quotation marks in attribute values, that could really gum up the works).
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Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
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Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
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Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
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