Need help with a program

[Cryosec]

I'm coding a program that will extract the text from a specific HTML tag in webpages loaded by url from a file (around a hundred links). The problem is, I have no idea how to go throu the HTML source of each webpage, read the text from the specific (and only one in the page) tag and eventually delete unwanted text (I need numbers, but there could be unnecessary text with it).

 

What would be the best language to use? And how can I do it?

[glitchmaster0001]

maybe try php5 

[madknight3]

7 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

What would be the best language to use?

What language(s) do you know already? Chances are you won't need to learn a new language just for this task.

 

8 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

And how can I do it?

Look into web scraping.

[Cryosec]

Just now, madknight3 said:

What language(s) do you know already?

C++, Python and Java. I'm still learning other languages, so just these for the moment.

[Cr3at1v3]

In Java you could use something like Jsoup. It can fetch the page from URL and parse it for you. Syntax is very easy, you just have to give it a CSS selector to get some HTML element.

[Cryosec]

Just now, Cr3at1v3 said:

In Java you could use something like Jsoup. It can fetch the page from URL and parse it for you. Syntax is very easy, you just have to give it a CSS selector to get some HTML element.

I'll try this out, thanks

[madknight3]

5 hours ago, Cryosec said:

C++, Python and Java. I'm still learning other languages, so just these for the moment.

Python should be pretty simple. You have plenty of options to choose from to help you out.

• BeautifulSoup
• Scrapy
• lxml

[Gachr]

 

 

[fizzlesticks]

17 minutes ago, Gachr said:

 

 

Unless the website is so malformed a real parser won't work or you're trying to parse inline JS, using regex on html is a pretty bad idea. 

 

Using an html / xml parser like the ones @madknight3 listed will be much easier, less prone to breaking on small changes to the website and be faster.