[kapep]

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

[bobince]

Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.

[falcor84]

And for that I applaud you.

I know it's a hassle for a platform to moderate good rants from bad ones, and I decry SO from pushing too hard against these. I truly believe that our industry would benefit from more drunken technical rants.

[scott_s]

I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.

[DangitBobby]

People have shared it here and on reddit a bunch of times because it's funny. I always found the pragmatic counter-answer about using regex and the comments about how brittle it is to parse XML properly assuming a specific structure to be much more useful.

[imtringued]

How is it more useful? Even if you insist on using regex, you'd primarily use it to fix the HTML so that it can be parsed, not to use regex itself to parse HTML.