From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2005-06-22T03:24:49+09:00
Subject: Re: HTML parsing as good as Perls.

James Britt said:
>
> Look at Narf, and its htmltools and xmltree.
> Or Michael Neumann's Mechanize. It wraps htmltools and xmltree.

I used Mechanize over the weekend and I just love it. In fact I had a
couple small problems that Michael fixed within hours.

I am using it to automate renewal of library books using my library's
web-site. I was amazed at how quickly I got my solution working, because
the library web-site software has some gnarly URLs and redirects that I
figured would be "fun" to deal with. But Mechanize makes it trivial.

Anyhow, the HTML from the library web-site parses fine and I easily scrape
out the information I care about (books titles, authors and due dates.)

Ryan