Perhaps you've missed the ongoing saga as Tricky asked numerous questions that have led to this thread. He has been given ample reasons why his approach was fatally flawed, but has insisted that he had to go forward anyway. Kind of like the Light Brigade...

If you were not aware of the history ex-thread, you certainly can be forgiven for your reaction.

However, note several things. I only *asked* if he was as dense as it appeared. Subtle, but (in my opinion) important. On my use of "stubborn" and "stupid", I tried to avoid absolute assertions about the character of Tricky, giving him some wiggle room to save face.

On the substance of your note: the full range of HTML markup is sufficiently complex in the right ways as to make parsing it by regular expressions impossible. A full-blown parser is required. I'm not able to explain it in gory details, but I recommend looking over Tricky's past posts to see how this whole meta-thread has developed.

yours,
Michael