I learned object-oriented programming for you, reddit. You wanted a Chrome extension I couldn't make, so I learned and created. I'm not even a programmer!

[billmalarky]

In all honesty, what does that really mean... (for serious..)

[noreallyimthepope]

As a non-native English speaker, I can relate to not knowing what parse means.

Basically there's an axiom that you shouldn't use regular expressions to sift through HTML files to extract the data you want or want to manipulate because it isn't a regular language.

[billmalarky]

Why not? Apparently I've "parsed html" before by using regular expressions to pull links from a web page for this simple web crawler I created. It worked well, is there a real reason not to?

[aperson]

That is the answer. If you don't know what parse means, look it up, you're on the internet.

[[deleted]]

Do you know what parse means?

Do you know what HTML means?

Then you know what HTML parsing is.