Preventing line breaks in <code> elements

hckrnws

Preventing line breaks in <code> elements

(alexwlchan.net)

16h

by surprisetalk

danlitt
1715h
You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.
1. layer8
  413h
  Some commenters are missing that this is a reference to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454.
  1. chrisandchris
    213h
    > Locked. There are disputes about this answer’s content being resolved at this time [sic]
    And also
    > Nov, 2020
    And then, StackOverflow asks itself why it looses users.
    layer8
    013h
    The answer is actually from 2009. As long as HTML/XML doesn’t suddenly become a regular language, I think it’s pretty timeless.
2. rokkamokka
  015h
  You can parse a subset of it though, like if you're in control of the html yourself and avoid certain structures
3. zarzavat
  114h
  Parsing HTML with a regex is never a good option, but it's sometimes the only option.
  1. pkal
    014h
    In the example from the article it certainly is an option. In Python you could either use a "soup" library or you could play around with a tool like https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/man1/hxpipe.html.
    The more fundamental question for me is why the author didn't decide to make make code blocks non-breaking by default, or just add the class annotations when he writes the HTML?
4. tyho
  414h
  You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length. Every finite language is regular, hence can be parsed with regex's.
  1. magicalist
    013h
    Zalgo and situational subset parsing aside:
    > You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length
    This isn't sufficient, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. It's not enough to have documents of finite length (all documents are finite in length), you need documents with a max length, so you have a finite number of possible documents to parse.
5. matheusmoreira
  014h
  Tony the pony, he comes.
6. timedude
  114h
  What do you mean you can't. I do it all the time
  1. throw1234567891
    013h
    You do some parts all the time.
7. prmoustache
  013h
  I do not count substitution as "parsing"
pwdisswordfishq
013h
Why even bother with the CSS class? Just apply text-wrap: nowrap; to all <code> elements and dispense with the fragile regex parsing.
dajtxx
04h
The 5 cm example had a line break between the 5 and the cm when I read the page in my phone. A joke?
pimlottc
013h
Unfortunately this makes it much harder to read on narrow-width screens (e.g. mobile), where the use must scroll horizontally