What language/tool should I use for HTML parsing?

Question

I have a couple of websites that I want to extract data from and based on previous experiences, this isn't as easy as it sound. Why? Simply because the HTML pages I have to parse aren't properly formatted (missing closing tag, etc.).

Considering that I have no constraints regarding the technology, language or tool that I can use, what are your suggestions to easily parse and extract data from HTML pages? I have tried HTML Agility Pack, BeautifulSoup, and even these tools aren't perfect (HTML Agility Pack is buggy, and BeautifulSoup parsing engine doesn't work with the pages I am passing to it).

Answer 1

You can use pretty much any language you like just don't try and parse HTML with regular expressions.

So let me rephrase that and say: you can use any language you like that has a HTML parser, which is pretty much everything invented in the last 15-20 years.

If you're having issues with particular pages I suggest you look into repairing them with HTML Tidy.

Answer 2

I think hpricot (linked by Colin Pickard) is ace. Add scrubyt to the mix and you get a great html scraping and browsing interface with the text matching power of Ruby http://scrubyt.org/

here is some example code from http://github.com/scrubber/scrubyt_examples/blob/7a219b58a67138da046aa7c1e221988a9e96c30e/twitter.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'scrubyt'

# Simple exmaple for scraping basic
# information from a public Twitter
# account.

# Scrubyt.logger = Scrubyt::Logger.new

twitter_data = Scrubyt::Extractor.define do
  fetch 'http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer'

  profile_info '//ul[@class="about vcard entry-author"]' do
    full_name "//li//span[@class='fn']"
    location "//li//span[@class='adr']"
    website "//li//a[@class='url']/@href"
    bio "//li//span[@class='bio']"
  end
end

puts twitter_data.to_xml