What's a regular language?

Posted by Javier Badia on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Javier Badia
Published on 2010-03-14T16:15:49Z Indexed on 2010/03/14 16:25 UTC
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regular-language

I've read that you can't parse HTML with regular expressions because HTML is not a regular language. I tried searching Wikipedia, but I didn't understand a word of what the various related articles said. Can someone explain, in simpler terms, what's a regular (or non-regular) language, and why non-regular languages can't be parsed with regexes?

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