3 ms·
I would say this is more exciting than it looks, though. I used to do a lot of crawling in the early 2000s, and almost all of it was expressed in terms of strin
by sam0x17 8y ago
I would say this is more exciting than it looks, though. I used to do a lot of crawling in the early 2000s, and almost all of it was expressed in terms of string_between calls. XPath is more convenient, but I'd say that 85% of the time you can collapse an XPath query into a string_between-style query. It can be awkward and even inconsistent, but in practice it often works well.
- sgc 8y agoHaving done a fair amount of work with xslt and using regex to strip out bad data, I agree. But 85% is terrible if you are creating a database. Any regex style query on xml or pseudo-xml requires bespoke treatment and a high amount of human hours to check the results before you can be sure an edge case didn't completely destroy your model.