Help me defeat the barbarians in the [regex] tag! [closed]

Question

After winding up on a regex question where literally every related question had the title "regular expression help" (with some variations in case and number of exclamation points) I kind of went on a crusade to give these questions distinct names. But I can't do it alone, there's just too many of them! Dive in and fix some titles!

When they all have the same title:

1. you can't find the right dupe to "close as duplicate" even though you know there's dozens of them
2. the people asking questions can't find the relevant dupes, leading to even more dupes
3. GOTO 1

I'd suspect this also hinders search engines trying to index them. This problem appears prevalent enough to even warrant an automated quality-control check for titles like /(php|javascript|perl)? (regular[- ]expression|regex) help/.

And if any diamond mods wanted to go through and close all the regex questions about parsing html/xml as duplicates of this one that'd do a lot of good too.

Duplicates of RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

(or if you prefer, Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex?)

• How to match second <a> tag in this string
• PHP/regex: How to get the string value of HTML tag?
• RegEx: Matching text that is not inside and part of a HTML tag
• Correctly matching an ending tag with its starting tag in HTML with a RegEx
• HTML tag replacement regex not quite working correctly
• How to replace text URLs and exclude URLs in HTML tags?
• Regex to replace html links to plain-text URLs
• HTML anchor replace with RegEx
• Replace an anchor with its innerHTML
• How replace all spaces inside HTML elements with &nbsp; using preg_replace?
• PHP Regular expression to replace link url
• Regular Expression to replace <p> tags with line breaks
• Regex to Match HTML Style Properties
• What regex would match a nested table with identifiable text in the table cell?
• PHP regular expression to remove tags in HTML document
• Regex PHP, Match all links with specific text
• php regex to extract data from HTML table
• Regex for html attributes in php
• Replacing image src in HTML tags?
• preg_match for nested html tags

Questions about email addresses and regular expressions can be closed as duplicates of What is the best regular expression for validating email addresses?

Answer 1

There are a number of vaguely related issues - one of them is common misspellings. For example:

• 'javscript' (about 530 left, but beware: in a few cases, the misspelling is the crux of the question and simply fixing it makes a nonsense of the question or the answers).

• 'mecurial' (about 50 left).

I've had a couple of binges working on 'javscript', but there's still a lot to do. Of course, mere mortals cannot fix up comments, so a few of the misspellings will remain.

Answer 2

I don't think thats a particularly suitable question to use as the duplicate - it doesn't actually answer any of those questions.

Whats needed is a question (and answer) which explains:

• Why parsing HTML using regualr expressions is a bad idea
• How HTML should be parsed (which is dependent on the framework you are using)
• Some guidance on how parse HTML with regular expressions for the cases where you want a quick and dirty solution

I've had a quick look but I'm really struggling to find a question which meets these criteria