

The Pumping Lemma, and Why It's Slightly More Important - yarapavan
http://codeinjection.blogspot.com/2011/02/pumping-lemma-and-why-its-slightly-more.html

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chwahoo
So the point of this discussion was showing that HTML cannot be parsed, in
general, using regular expressions and asserting "... it turns out that the
programmers who don't understand the pumping lemma are the same programmers
who unnecessarily reinvent well established tools when faced with simple
problems."

I don't buy this. I've never heard of people attempting to develop a single
regular expression to generally parse HTML/XML. The pumping lemma doesn't
prevent people from using regular expressions to grab bits of info out of
particular pages for which they know the layout.

While there are maintainability and generality concerns with doing so, the
"quick and dirty" regex approach can work in particular cases and isn't a sign
that a developer lacks a proper grounding in FSM-theory... in fact, it might
be a fine solution for one-off tasks.

