Parsing HTML with regex

[Robin S]

For a brief moment I was contemplating parsing HTML with regex but then StackOverflow taught me this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/1036672

My sides are now hurting ?

[Jan Romero]

That’s a classic, but I’ve been scraping some stuff lately, and I’m not ashamed to say it looks like this and works fine:

Regex playlistRegex = new Regex(@"playlist = (\[.*?\]);", RegexOptions.Singleline);
Regex titelRegex = new Regex("player-archive-date.*?>(.*?)</div>.*?<span>(.*?)</span>", RegexOptions.Singleline);
Regex mp3Regex = new Regex(@"stream_url\s*?=\s*?'(.*?\.mp3)';");
Regex datumRegex = new Regex("datum=([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9])");

//…
  
var i = line.IndexOf("/player/xxx/?xxx=xxx");
if (i == -1)
    continue;

c++;

line = line.Substring(i);
line = line.Substring(0, line.IndexOf("\");'"));
line = line.Replace("&", "&");
var datum = datumRegex.Match(line).Groups[1].Value;

*cough*

Of course, I can make solid assumptions about my input here.

The limited problem of stackoverflow’s OP seems somewhat suitable for regex, too, although I’m unsure what they’re trying to accomplish. Find all non-self-closing opening tags?