uhh? just because you can doesn't mean you should just take a look at proposed regex >( > # match all tags in XHTML but capture only opening tags > <!-- .

uhh? just because you can doesn't mean you should just take a look at proposed regex >( > # match all tags in XHTML but capture only opening tags > <!-- .? --> # comment > | <!\[CDATA\[ .? \]\]> # CData section > | <!DOCTYPE ( "" [^""]* "" | ' [^']* ' | [^>/'""] )* > > | <\? .? \?> # xml declaration or processing instruction > | < \w+ ( "" [^""] "" | ' [^']* ' | [^>/'""] )* /> # self-closing tag > | < (?<tag> \w+ ) ( "" [^""]* "" | ' [^']* ' | [^>/'""] )* > # opening tag - captured > | </ \w+ \s* > # end tag > ) it's ugly as hell >Parsing typically uses (at least) two steps: Tokenization which uses regular expressions to splits the input string into a sequence of syntax elements I don't use regex for tokenization, I'm doing something wrong? But overall I think this is important post, even despite I believe that regex is the best example of "good idea, shitty API"