quarantine 'em

Procedure for building a regular expression to match an XHTML open tag: https://gist.github.com/ferno/013a796b17314266b2b1 …

And here's the resulting regex which will actually match an XHTML open tag: https://gist.github.com/ferno/0e282c33e08df265bc5e …

It's not pretty but it's strictly regular which means it'll even run in linear time

"But I didn't want to parse arbitrary HTML. You haven't answered my question" "Too late, I have 4000 votes and the question is closed"

"Have you tried using an XML parser?" "How do they work?" "Well, quite often they start by tokenising the stream, using regexes"

This is called an "XX problem". "No, I really do need what I asked for. Please stop second-guessing me and answer the question as stated"

"Why do you want to do that?" is frequently code for "I don't know how to do that."

"Why do you want to do that?" can also mean "I don't want to do that, and lack the empathy to envisage use cases other than my own"