Programmer Humor

Guess who recently asked a company if he could get access to the API they use to load stuff in their frontend from their backend and got told "Nope and btw scraping is against our TOS"?

Well, if you won't give it to me the info that you provide anyway the easy way, I can still take it the hard way. 🤷‍♂️

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML. HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me. Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML. You will never make me crack. HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n​erves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror. Rege̿̔̉x-based HTML parsers are the cancer that is killing StackOverflow it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved the transgression of a chi͡ld ensures regex will consume all living tissue (except for HTML which it cannot, as previously prophesied) dear lord help us how can anyone survive this scourge using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security holes using regex as a tool to process HTML establishes a breach between this world and the dread realm of c͒ͪo͛ͫrrupt entities (like SGML entities, but more corrupt) a mere glimpse of the world of reg​ex parsers for HTML will ins​tantly transport a programmer's consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming, he comes~~, the pestilent sl~~ithy regex-infection wil​l devour your HT​ML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fi​ght he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵i​s un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain, the song of re̸gular exp​re~~ssion parsing ~~will exti​nguish the voices of mor​tal man from the sp​here I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful t​he final snuffing of the lie​s of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T A*LL I​S LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮om~~es he co~~**~~me~~s the* ich​or permeates all MY FAC*E MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼O​O NΘ stop the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑en​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝*S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

I got a bot on lemmy that scrapes espn for sports/football updates using regex to retrieve the JSON that is embedded in the html file, it works perfectly so far 🤷‍♂️

🤢

Delete all line breaks, add one each <, get the data you want per line and you're good.

Of course, only for targeted data extraction. ...which should be the default in any parser, really.

They should just charge a tiny fee, or return Error 402 Payment Required.

I don’t get it

First time I'm seeing this, and I have to say I admire their dedication to the joke.

Zombo.com is a single-serving site created in 1999...

...

The site was initially a Flash animation, but as of 5 January 2021, it switched to HTML5 due to the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player.

They're gonna tell not to parse HTML with regular expressions. Heed this warning, and do it anyways.

Beautiful Soup (python library, bs4) is also fren

what do you want to scrape.

Consider free API first if possible.

I scrape my own bank and financial aggregator to have a self hosted financial tool. I scrape my health insurance to pull in data to track for my HSA. I scrape Strava to build my own health reports.

I only did one scraping script that took the top 25 hotels from a booking.com Web page with their prices. They used to do those manually

Zombocom

postmarket OS tables because I was looking forna device that was unofficially supported but somehow not in their damn table