But according to a comment on the post, "Chuck Norris can parse HTML with regex" (emphasis in original). More seriously, when SO was newer, I remember the feel

But according to a comment on the post, "Chuck Norris can parse HTML with regex" (emphasis in original). More seriously, when SO was newer, I remember the feeling that these things came in waves. For a few months, there was someone who responded to nearly every offending Ruby question (or answer) by pointing out that exceptions shouldn't be used for flow control. See these two by another poster for more on HTML and regexes[1][2]. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701166/can-you-provide-some-examples-of-why-it-is-hard-to-parse-xml-and-html-with-a-rege http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701166/can-you-provide-so... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/773340/can-you-provide-an-example-of-parsing-html-with-your-favorite-parser http://stackoverflow.com/questions/773340/can-you-provide-an...