Awful title, and the reason why I'm having such a hard time finding the right answer - not quite sure where this falls. Machine learning? Semantic programming? Searching is finding general articles or oblique references, but I'm having a hard time finding anything really meaty.

What I'm looking for is suggestions for an approach to identify repeating data patterns on a page, so that I can automatically scrape a selection of attributes from the page of listing results. Eg, item name, price, description. Then, try to identify the semantic meaning of the elements within each repeating pattern, based on regular expressions / string length.

What I'm thinking of is along the lines of an algorithm that looks for repetition in the HTML structure of the page, and then examines them for the relevant data - could be table rows, divs, paragraphs, lists - trying to be as generic as possible...

Does anyone have any good article or module recommendations that could help with this? Ideally, I'd want this to work standalone as much as possible, and only allocate a minority of cases for human review.