In my project I need to extract links from HTML document. For this purpose I've prepared ragel HTML grammar, primarily based on this work: https://github.com/brianpane/jitify-core/blob/master/src/core/jitify_html_lexer.rl (mentioned here: http://ragel-users.complang.narkive.com/qhjr33zj/ragel-grammars-for-html-css-and-javascript )
Almost all works well (thanks for the great tool!), except one issue I can't overcome to date:
If I specify this thext as an input:
bbbb <a href="first_link.aspx"> cccc<a href="/second_link.aspx">
my parser can correctly extract first link, but not the second one.
The difference between them is that there is a space between 'bbbb' and '<a', but no spaces between 'cccc' and '<a'.
In general, if any text, except spaces, exists before '<a' tag it makes parses consider it as content, and parser do not recognize tag opening.
Please find in this repo intentionally simplified sample with grammar, aiming to work as C program ( ngx_url_html_portion.rl ). There is also input file input-nbsp.html , which expected to contain input for the application.
You need Ragel. You can get your platform binaries from the website URL or build from the source using gcc.
In order to play with it, make .c-file from grammar:
ragel ngx_url_html_portion.rl
then compile resulting .c-file and run programm. Input file should be in the same directory.