Panspermia—the idea that the life started off-planet and managed to seed the Earth—is a recurrent trope in science fiction.
(Pseudopanspermia—the idea that the building blocks of life started off-planet—is still a widely entertained hypothesis in mainstream biology. It’s frequently noted that comets and meteors ejected from Mars contain amino acids.)
Back in the day when running a Perl script that used an XML parser was CPU-intensive and likely to get your shared hosting account suspended, I did spend time trying to parse pseudo-XML with regexes, which did make me feel kind of dirty.
My favorite response to people who insisted on parsing HTML or XML with regexes is from Stack Overflow:
Jeff Atwood is more concilliatory and I suppose you can totally parse HTML or XML with regexes if you know exactly what kind of output you’re getting (but then you still have to wonder why you’re parsing with regexes and/or bothering with HTML or XML) but it still really does give me the heebiejeebies.
Anyway, using nokogiri is pretty easy now (although building libxml2 from source is apparently still a pain in the ass if you’re not using package management.)