[uf-discuss] Parsing XFN in PHP

[Julian Bond]

Ryan Parman <ryan.lists.warpshare at gmail.com> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:05:47
>As someone with a background in parsing RSS/Atom, I can say from years 
>of experience that RSS is only occasionally XML and that you typically 
>find far more HTML in a feed than XML. And parsing HTML can be a bitch.

Big snip.

Woah! That's enough to put one off even starting on parsing and reading 
uF. Which makes uF all a bit pointless. Oh dear. :(

I suspect though that this Gordian knot can be cut. It seems quite 
likely that any page marked up with uF is good enough that HTML-Tidy 
won't remove too many uF marked up elements. If that's the case, then 
Fetch html -> HTML-Tidy -> XML parsing is going to get 99% of the job 
done and successfully extract the uF marked data. But that HTML-Tidy 
step is going to be indispensable. It just plain won't work without it. 
And the shortcut that reduces even that step is 
DomDocument>loadHtml($html) which is effectively doing the same thing.

It would be interesting to do some interop testing and see just how bad 
a web page has to be before the uF starts getting missed.

And a uF validator would come in handy there.

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