From: TLOlczyk <olczyk2002@...>
Date: 2005-06-22T01:55:36+09:00
Subject: HTML parsing as good as Perls.

First let me be very clear. I hate the language that Larry "should be
lined up against a " Wall has written. IMO it encourages people
to program with, well only men can program that way, instead of their
heads.

However as bad as the language is, LWP is one of the best libraries
around when it comes to web related applications. Most notablely
I have never found a library which can parse HTML as well as 
LWPs HTML parser. It is my eternal hope that I can find a library as
good, and dump the language.


With the advent of Ruby on Rails, I am hopeful that there might be a
package in Ruby that gives Perl's HTML parser a run for it's money.

I'm nt looking for an XML parser, XML parsers just can't handle
many of the web sites I want to parse. Neither can expat,libxml2 
or some of the more popular libraries. Don't suggest I pass it through
Tidy then parse the XML. There are a lot of pages that Tidy can't
handle.

Finally, there will be some smartass,  who will say that I should use
web sites that are written in good HTML. I don't have choice of what 
pages I or the people to ask me to write scripts take our content
from. Fine. If you have the millions to pay all those webmasters to
hire HTML gurus that will generate good HTML let me know and
I will email you a list. As for me, I am too busy with real work on my
own projects to go around nagging people working on other things to
improve their coding style.

Thanks







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**
Thaddeus L. Olczyk, PhD

There is a difference between
*thinking* you know something,
and *knowing* you know something.