Chapter 4. Basic Parsing Techniques
Parsing is the process of separating what’s useful from what is not. For webbot developers, parsing involves detecting, extracting, and storing items like images, key words, prices, and other information of interest from the HTML and other scripts that make up web pages. For example, if you are writing a spider that follows links on web pages, you will want to separate the links from the rest of the HTML. Similarly, if you write a webbot to download all the images from a web page, you will have to write parsing routines that identify the locations of all the references to image files.
Content Is Mixed with Markup
Web pages pose a unique challenge because they mix content with the HTML tags that format the content. ...
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