Comment by kapep

Comment by kapep 14 hours ago

4 replies

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

bobince 13 hours ago

Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.

  • falcor84 12 hours ago

    And for that I applaud you.

    I know it's a hassle for a platform to moderate good rants from bad ones, and I decry SO from pushing too hard against these. I truly believe that our industry would benefit from more drunken technical rants.

  • scott_s 11 hours ago

    I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.

DangitBobby 13 hours ago

People have shared it here and on reddit a bunch of times because it's funny. I always found the pragmatic counter-answer about using regex and the comments about how brittle it is to parse XML properly assuming a specific structure to be much more useful.