What are the drawbacks of using regex for parsing HTML compared to using DOM manipulation in PHP?

When parsing HTML, using regular expressions (regex) can be error-prone and difficult to maintain due to the complexity and variability of HTML syntax. It is generally recommended to use DOM manipulation in PHP instead, as it provides a more reliable and structured way to traverse and manipulate HTML elements. 

// Example of using DOM manipulation in PHP to parse HTML
$html = '<div><p>Hello, World!</p></div>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$paragraphs = $dom->getElementsByTagName('p');
foreach ($paragraphs as $paragraph) {
    echo $paragraph->nodeValue; // Output: Hello, World!
}

Keywords

regex parsing HTML DOM manipulation drawbacks

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