> Locked. There are disputes about this answer’s content being resolved at this time [sic]

And also

> Nov, 2020

And then, StackOverflow asks itself why it looses users.

Good ol' appeal to emotion devoid of technical argument.

In the example from the article it certainly is an option. In Python you could either use a "soup" library or you could play around with a tool like https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/man1/hxpipe.html.

The more fundamental question for me is why the author didn't decide to make make code blocks non-breaking by default, or just add the class annotations when he writes the HTML?

Zalgo and situational subset parsing aside:

> You can absolutely parse HTML with regex, so long as the document is finite in length

This isn't sufficient, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. It's not enough to have documents of finite length (all documents are finite in length), you need documents with a max length, so you have a finite number of possible documents to parse.

Do a web search for the parent of your comment, read the Stackoverflow answer. It's a classic. Learn about Zalgo and Tony the pony, he comes.

and you write your regex specifically for that document length, handling all possible nesting combinations. combinatoric explosion

You do some parts all the time.