Re: Stripping HTML tags

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

Florian Berger wrote:

> ...
> Chris Marring wrote:
>  > You could just use luaexpat and then extract out what you need. This
>  > is especially easy with the Lua Object Model feature, which simply
>  > returns the HTML as a hierarchy of tables. Expat is very good at
>  > grokking all the twisty bits of HTML, so this could help get past all 
>  > that...
>
> How well does LuaExpat work if HTML is not clean or valid?

My experience with expat (NOT used with LuaExpat) is that it makes a 
valiant effort to deal with a few things. But for the most part, invalid 
HTML generates an error and aborts. I think there is a way to get expat 
to continue if there is a validity error. For instance, I think you can 
get it to handle the case where a an EndElement has the wrong name. But 
for the most part invalid HTML, like invalid C, is hard to fix and make 
any sense of. And I don't know how easy it would be to get LuaExpat to 
be tolerant of errors.

My general rule is "always use valid HTML" :-)

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