Posted by mbstevens on 02/17/07 01:58

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 12:38:42 +1100, dorayme wrote:

> In article <pan.2007.02.16.23.23.59.558711@xmbstevensx.com>,
> mbstevens <NOXwebmasterx@xmbstevensx.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 08:53:41 +1100, dorayme wrote:
>>
>> > Come on guys, get real!
>>
>> If it will take you more time to do by hand
>> than it would to write a script, go for the script.
>> Time spent learning to script does not count!
>> Don't you want that bubbly feeling of absolute power
>> over your computing environment?
>
> Confession time: I can labour over a GREP pattern to do in an
> hour what I could do without it in a minute or two. But do you
> think I would actually recommend such madness to others?

Oh, goodness, not grep! A bit of Perl or Python that have modules for
HTML parsing and also have regular expressions integrated into a full
bodied language. (OK, a module for regexes in Python, but that's no
problem.)

Knowing you, I'm pretty sure that if you spent a week learning either,
paying particular attention to the regular expressions and HTML parser
modules, you would be able to write the program in about an hour.

I suggest Python if it is your first scripting language. Perl is easier
for people with C background. (Ducks as people from all over the net
throw brickbats.)

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