Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

Parser stage

The parser stage parses the returned HTML and extracts all hyperlinks (<a> tags). Delphi does not contain a HTML parser in a standard distribution and as I wanted to remove any dependencies on third-party HTML parsers, I cheated a bit and used regular expressions to detect <a href="..." in the page.

The parser doesn't check whether the returned content is actually in HTML format or not. It merely scans the result for a simple regular expression.

In production code, you should never parse HTML with a regular expression. This doesn't work. Regular expressions are too limited to parse HTML.

The parser stage sets up the regular expression parser and then loops through all the data in the input queue. Each input is parsed and all ...