What are the potential drawbacks of using regular expressions for parsing HTML content in PHP, and how can they be mitigated?

Using regular expressions for parsing HTML content in PHP can be error-prone and difficult to maintain due to the complexity of HTML structures. Instead, it is recommended to use a dedicated HTML parsing library like DOMDocument or SimpleHTMLDOM to ensure more reliable and robust parsing of HTML content. 

// Example using DOMDocument to parse HTML content
$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

regular expressions parsing HTML content drawbacks mitigated

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