In my limited experience with screenscrapers, that failure mode is usually caused by someone at the other end changing the formatting. You're looking for the stuff you want with a regex, rather than an html parser, so you can easily be a victim of very minor changes in the html. Your best bet is probably about 10 minutes of looking at the page source and then revising the regex accordingly. Switching to using HTML::TreeBuilder and taking advantage of predictable page structure and tag attributes might make your script a little more robust (or it might not, depending on who is messing with it at the other end...). I have a scraper that's been running reliably for several years now through a number of changes in the target page's display format since I switched to treebuilder.

In reply to Re: fix the problem of the web crawler by bitingduck
in thread fix the problem of the web crawler by ati

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