[unlinkr]

Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting highly upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here: https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/

In short, the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... is complete legitimately and answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question for trying to do something "impossible".

In general I do like SO quite a lot and find it very useful. But this is one example where SO spread wrong and misleading information. But when I wrote a post on meta.stackoverflow to point out this particular problem, it was quickly downvoted to -25 before getting deleted.

[banana_giraffe]

The Zalgo response drives me slightly crazy.

Most of the time I've actually seen people asking about regex's and HTML are asking for a very small subset of both, they generally just want to parse a bunch of pages generated by a small number of tools, and yet they get told it's impossible to use Regex to do it.

The second answer is spot on, actually answers the question, yet the first one is the one that gets treated as gospel.

[dehrmann]

I keep trying to come up with one of these, usually in the form of an absurdly correct answer.