Preventing line breaks in <code> elements(alexwlchan.net)
11 pointsby surprisetalk7 hours ago3 comments
  • danlitt6 hours ago
    You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.
    • layer84 hours ago
      Some commenters are missing that this is a reference to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454.
      • chrisandchris4 hours ago
        > Locked. There are disputes about this answer’s content being resolved at this time [sic]

        And also

        > Nov, 2020

        And then, StackOverflow asks itself why it looses users.

        • layer84 hours ago
          The answer is actually from 2009. As long as HTML/XML doesn’t suddenly become a regular language, I think it’s pretty timeless.
        • magicalist4 hours ago
          It's a 17 year old joke, maybe one of the most famous on stackoverflow for the aging engineers out there. No one wants new "funny" edits on it.
      • pwdisswordfishq4 hours ago
        Good ol' appeal to emotion devoid of technical argument.
    • rokkamokka6 hours ago
      You can parse a subset of it though, like if you're in control of the html yourself and avoid certain structures
    • zarzavat5 hours ago
      Parsing HTML with a regex is never a good option, but it's sometimes the only option.
      • pkal5 hours ago
        In the example from the article it certainly is an option. In Python you could either use a "soup" library or you could play around with a tool like https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/man1/hxpipe.html.

        The more fundamental question for me is why the author didn't decide to make make code blocks non-breaking by default, or just add the class annotations when he writes the HTML?

    • tyho4 hours ago
      You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length. Every finite language is regular, hence can be parsed with regex's.
      • magicalist4 hours ago
        Zalgo and situational subset parsing aside:

        > You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length

        This isn't sufficient, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. It's not enough to have documents of finite length (all documents are finite in length), you need documents with a max length, so you have a finite number of possible documents to parse.

      • gpvos4 hours ago
        Do a web search for the parent of your comment, read the Stackoverflow answer. It's a classic. Learn about Zalgo and Tony the pony, he comes.
      • 4 hours ago
        undefined
    • prmoustache4 hours ago
      I do not count substitution as "parsing"
    • matheusmoreira5 hours ago
      Tony the pony, he comes.
    • timedude5 hours ago
      What do you mean you can't. I do it all the time
  • pwdisswordfishq4 hours ago
    Why even bother with the CSS class? Just apply text-wrap: nowrap; to all <code> elements and dispense with the fragile regex parsing.
  • pimlottc4 hours ago
    Unfortunately this makes it much harder to read on narrow-width screens (e.g. mobile), where the use must scroll horizontally