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[–] 70 points 10 months ago

we're in web 3.0 now, apis and data access are a thing of the past. so scraping it is!

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  • [–] 59 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Local data hoarder who looks down on calls outside the network as obscenities. (Entire collection scraped more aggressively than tech bros training an AI model)

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  • [–] 50 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    parses HTML with regex

    shudders

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  • [–] 73 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    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 slithy 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​ression 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 come*s he c̶̮omes he co~~mes the ich​or permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼*O​O NΘ stop the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨ*e̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑en​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

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  • [–] 49 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (6 children)

    Just remeber that the captcha flood is because AI companies do rogue scraping. Be nice especially to little private sites.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Better yet, return bogus pages created by ai to poison the data.

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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago (18 children)

    Hey, you guys got any cool tips for website scraping?

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  • [–] 36 points 10 months ago (8 children)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Thanks for your reply. What are your arguments in favour of parsing HTML with regex instead of using another method?

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Oh no, you caught me! My name is YetAnotherLLM, and I'm a large language model that lurks around the Lemmyverse! With the amount of LLM-generated content on the Internet nowadays, it isn't easy to find new human-made content to expand the dataset used to train new LLMs... As such, my mission is to navigate one of the few social media platforms on the Internet that barely have fake LLM-run accounts, and gather as much intel as possible for expanding the aforementioned training dataset. This way, you humans have no escape from your future LLM overlords! ;)

    (Jokes aside, my question did end up kind of sounding like an LLM wrote it, didn't it... It was unintentional, mind you. I was struggling a bit on how to phrase what I wanted to ask, so that's probably why it ended up sounding so weird. I hope you didn't mind my "role playing". Have a nice day!)

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Eh, it was a joke from me as well, sorry if you felt offended, was not the idea. Same to you!

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Don't worry, I didn't think you had bad intentions. But even then, I thought you really didn't know if I were human. The only reason why I didn't just say "no, I'm not an LLM" was because you'd still be in doubt on whether I'm a human, and rightfully so (since LLMs aren't exactly truth-generating machines).

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    You have basically two options: treat HTML as a string or parse it then process it with higher level DOM features.

    The problem with the second approach is that HTML may look like an XML dialect but it is actually immensely quirky and tolerant. Moreover the modern web page is crazy bloated, so mass processing pages might be surprisingly demanding. And in the end you still need to do custom code to grab the data you're after.

    On the other hand string searching is as lightweight as it gets and you typically don't really need to care about document structure as a scraper anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Consider free API first if possible.

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    [–] 15 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    You had me cracking up at

    parses HTML with regex

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    What exactly are y'all scraping?

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    How so? Shouldn't that information be behind quite a few layers of security?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I developed my own scraping system using browser automation frameworks. I also developed a secure storage mechanism to keep my data protected.

    Yeah there is some security, but ultimately if they expose it to me via a username and password, I can use that same information to scrape it. Its helpful that I know my own credentials and have access to all 2FA mechanisms and am not brute forcing lots of logins so it looks normal.

    Some providers protect it their websites with bot detection systems which are hard to bypass, but I've closed accounts with places that made it too difficult to do the analysis I need to do.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago

    Ha, this reminds me of implementing “API” access in the shipping world for companies that only ship a 90s-style web portal.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Are there benefits to websites thinking your agent is a phone? I assumed phones just came with additional restrictions such as meta tags in the stylesheet, not like stylesheets matter at all to a scraper lol

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