因为有很多方法可以“搞砸”HTML，浏览器会以一种相当自由的方式对待它们，但要用正则表达式重现浏览器的自由行为来覆盖所有情况需要相当大的努力，所以你的正则表达式将不可避免地在某些特殊情况下失败，这可能会在你的系统中引入严重的安全漏洞。

You, know...there's a lot of mentality of you CAN'T do it and I think that everyone on both sides of the fence are right and wrong. You CAN do it, but it takes a little more processing than just running one regex against it. Take this (I wrote this inside of an hour) as an example. It assumes the HTML is completely valid, but depending on what language you're using to apply the aforementioned regex, you could do some fixing of the HTML to make sure that it will succeed. For example, removing closing tags that are not supposed to be there: </img> for example. Then, add the closing single HTML forward slash to elements that are missing them, etc.

我将在编写一个库的上下文中使用它，该库允许我执行类似于JavaScript的[x]. getelementsbytagname()的HTML元素检索。我只是拼接了我在正则表达式的DEFINE部分中编写的功能，并使用它来进入元素树，一次一个。

那么，这将是验证HTML的最终100%答案吗?不。但这只是个开始，只要再努力一点，就可以做到。然而，试图在一个正则表达式执行中完成它是不实际的，也不有效。

Actually, HTML parsing with regex is perfectly possible in PHP. You just have to parse the whole string backwards using strrpos to find < and repeat the regex from there using ungreedy specifiers each time to get over nested tags. Not fancy and terribly slow on large things, but I used it for my own personal template editor for my website. I wasn't actually parsing HTML, but a few custom tags I made for querying database entries to display tables of data (my <#if()> tag could highlight special entries this way). I wasn't prepared to go for an XML parser on just a couple of self created tags (with very non-XML data within them) here and there.

所以，即使这个问题已经死了，它仍然会出现在谷歌搜索中。我读了它，并认为“接受挑战”，并完成了修复我的简单代码，而不需要替换所有东西。决定给有类似理由的人提供不同的意见。最后一个答案是4小时前发布的，所以这仍然是一个热门话题。

请记住，虽然HTML本身不是规则的，但您正在查看的页面的某些部分可能是规则的。

例如，<form>标签被嵌套是一个错误;如果网页正常工作，那么使用正则表达式获取<form>将是完全合理的。

I recently did some web scraping using only Selenium and regular expressions. I got away with it because the data I wanted was put in a <form>, and put in a simple table format (so I could even count on <table>, <tr> and <td> to be non-nested--which is actually highly unusual). In some degree, regular expressions were even almost necessary, because some of the structure I needed to access was delimited by comments. (Beautiful Soup can give you comments, but it would have been difficult to grab <!-- BEGIN --> and <!-- END --> blocks using Beautiful Soup.)

但是，如果我不得不担心嵌套表，那么我的方法根本就行不通!我就只能靠《美丽汤》了。但是，即使这样，有时也可以使用正则表达式获取所需的块，然后从那里展开。

就解析而言，正则表达式在“词法分析”(lexer)阶段很有用，在这个阶段，输入被分解成标记。它在实际的“构建解析树”阶段用处不大。

对于HTML解析器，我希望它只接受格式良好的HTML，而这需要正则表达式所不能做到的功能(它们不能“计数”并确保给定数量的开始元素与相同数量的结束元素相平衡)。

正则表达式并不是为处理嵌套的标记结构而设计的，要处理真正HTML中可能出现的所有边缘情况，往好里说是复杂的(往坏里说是不可能的)。