What are the potential pitfalls of using regular expressions for parsing HTML documents in PHP?

Using regular expressions for parsing HTML documents in PHP can be error-prone and unreliable due to the complex and varied nature of HTML. It is generally recommended to use a dedicated HTML parsing library like DOMDocument or SimpleHTMLDom instead. These libraries provide a more robust and accurate way to extract information from HTML documents. 

// Using DOMDocument to parse HTML
$html = '<html><body><h1>Hello, World!</h1></body></html>';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

$headings = $doc->getElementsByTagName('h1');
foreach ($headings as $heading) {
    echo $heading->nodeValue;
}

Keywords

regular expressions parsing HTML documents PHP pitfalls

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