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Ask YC: What do you scrape? How do you scrape?
Theory-wise, there's regular languages, context-free grammars, and combinatorial categorial grammars ( http://openccg.sf.net ). But regular + lists seems adequate for most tasks.
What sorts of scraping do you find yourself doing?
What are your biggest frustrations?
What's the coolest hack you've encountered while scraping?
My cofounder and I have been working on a domain-specific language to make scraping quick and easy, so that you can write, say, 100 different website scrapers in less time -- http://dartbanks.com/simplescrape . We'd love feedback on this approach.