some people don't close things like <p> In html5 you generally don't need to close p tags: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/p.html http://www.w3.org/TR/html-ma

some people don't close things like <p> In html5 you generally don't need to close p tags: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/p.html http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/p.html Others omit the self-closing / on certain tags In html5 the / is meaningless and ignored: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/syntax.html#syntax-start-tag http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/syntax.html#syntax-... And you wouldn't expect to use RegEx to parse any other broken text document that fails to follow a defined, knowable schema either. If you want to extract information from a text document without a defined and respected format, a RegEx will often do better than anything else common.