Screen scraping gotchas

Question

When screen-scraping, what are the "gotcha"s to look out for?

The inspiration for this is: my spouse's co-worker asked me to scrape all the pages from a Blogger-hosted blog that her friend with cancer kept in her final months and this lady wanted to keep all of the posts in case the blog were ever deleted. I eventually found a free tool that was barely good enough.

One issue with scraping many Blogger pages is that there's often a navigation menu where you can click on the triangles to expand the post lists by year or month. These little buggers created insane amounts of duplicate content because you'd have the same page over and over again with different combinations of the menus being expanded/collapsed. In Blogger's case I'm not sure this is avoidable since the links are all formatted as real http links and not obvious JavaScript calls. Still, it got me thinking:

If you were to scrape a website, what kinds of potentially non-obvious things would you compensate for?

Answer 1

Do not use regex to scrape

While regular expressions can be good for a large variety of tasks, I find it usually falls short when parsing HTML DOM. The problem with HTML is that the structure of your document is so variable that it is hard to accurately (and by accurately I mean 100% success rate with no false positive) extract a tag.

What I recommend you do is use a DOM parser such as BeautifulSoup or equivalent (SimpleHTMLDom in PHP).

Some may think this is overkill, but in the end, it will be easier to maintain and also allows for more extensibility.

A regular expression could be devised to achieve the same goal but would be limited. For example, developing a regex to get the src and alt tag would force the alt attribute to be after the src or the opposite, and to overcome this limitation would add more complexity to the regular expression.

Also, consider the following. To properly match an <img> tag using regular expressions and to get only the src attribute (captured in group 2), you need the following regular expression:

<\s*?img\s+?[^>]*?\s*?src\s*?=\s*?(["'])((\\?+.)*?)\1[^>]*?>

And then again, the above can fail if:

• The attribute or tag name is in capital and the i modifier is not used.
• Quotes are not used around the src attribute.
• Another attribute then src uses the > character somewhere in their value.
• Some other reason I have not foreseen.

So again, simply don't use regular expressions to parse a dom document.