[uf-discuss] Re: Parsing XFN in PHP

[Ryan Parman]

On Apr 10, 2008, at 10:04 AM, Julian Bond wrote:
> 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. :(

Sarcasm noted. ;)


> 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.

On Apr 10, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.dom-domdocument-loadhtml.php

This is interesting -- especially if it works. However the version  
information is noted as CVS-only. Is this in a shipping version of PHP  
yet?

Using HTML-Tidy is a fairly big gotcha for most people on shared  
hosting. I don't know the stats, but I would guess that not many  
hosting providers have this installed. I have access to dedicated  
hardware, so I'm definitely interested in this (assuming it works as  
expected, of course), but I'm concerned about the community at-large.

On Apr 10, 2008, at 10:04 AM, Julian Bond wrote:
> 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.


I agree.

--
Ryan Parman
<http://ryanparman.com>