in reply to Seeking input on pattern generation.

as noted above educated gives a module that lets you diff with context My question is more about what your real problem is.

You state that I would like to create a program that would create functions specifically designed to to pull apart a particular page template What do you mean by pull apart? are you trying to write some translation machine to convert to a new template file? Trying to standardize the templates down to a core template with diffs? If you are trying to do the latter to minimize your work you need to be careful as diffs _are_ context sensitive and making a change in the master template can (and if customizations are high) will make the context portion of your diffs invalid. Let me know what the real problem is that you are trying to solve -- there may be a better way.

-Waswas
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Re: Re: Seeking input on pattern generation.
by GermanHerman (Sexton) on Jul 22, 2003 at 17:00 UTC
    By pull apart I mean extract data from. This program is going to help me monitor pricing on websites that my employer buys products from very frequently. We have a bandwidth shortage so we need to precache the pricing information from the pages. I am looking at a long list of pages here and I need to get the information from an entire section of every site. I have spent a few days creating some really general scripts that work with differant site configurations, and they work alright but I am still spending too much time formulating regular expressions. These sites usually are entirly out of a database with no custom code whatsoever.

    -Douglas
      If this is a company that you do large volumes of orders from have you talked to them to see if they will provide a csv dump of their product list? Scraping data like this off an order site just seems like a huge job with little payoff.

      -Waswas
        That was absolutly the first thing I did. This DB is for rare chemicals and most of the people that I talked to (I did manage to get a couple freebies) were totally unprepared for my request.
        -Douglas