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The best answer on StackOverflow: Using RegEx to parse HTML
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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no, this is one of the worst answers on Stack Overflow
OP had a specific question to capture opening tags. The thing OP asked about can be done with regular expressions. It is true that arbitrarily nested languages like HTML cannot generally be parsed with regular expressions, but that is not what OP asked about.
It can't be done, as an opening tag in html can contain anything in its attributes, even JavaScript (e.g. onclick handler).
??? Non sequitur
You can't parse every html opening tag with regex, because a html opening tag doesn't have a set structure. How would you match, with regex, this opening tag?
<mytag myattribute="<value of \"myattribute\">" >Is this valid HTML? My understanding is that that attribute value needs to be escaped, i.e.
<value of \"myattribute\">.The quote must not be escaped when you start with a single quote. The rest doesn't. This is valid and tested:
<img alt='my "<img>"'>