[tpm] Solutions and kibitzers

[Olaf Alders]

On 2013-10-22, at 12:45 PM, arocker at Vex.Net wrote:

> 
> On the weekend, I responded to a new posting on LinkedIn's Perl discussion
> group,"Needhelp to parse data using Perl, AWK or any unix commad " with a
> quickie script, and updated it with an improved version the following day.
> 
> It seemed to be a simple problem, parsing some sort of *ML stream, and
> wc's output on the script was  25  88 526. (6 of those 25 lines do the
> actual work.)
> 
> To my surprise, I've received all sorts of abuse for not using an XML
> parser module. (To which the poster may or may not have had easy access.)
> Even though it appears to have solved the poster's problem, the critics
> have devoted more keystrokes to complaining than I did producing results.
> Now I'm beginning to have doubts.
> 
> Would anyone care to read the discussion and comment?

Without having read the discussion in question, if you post this sort of solution on StackOverflow, you usually get pointed at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression-pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string as an argument against doing the hard work by hand rather than using a parser.  Look for the "Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML!" answer.  


--
Olaf Alders
olaf.alders at gmail.com

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