Hello wise Monks,

I need to extract a bunch of data out of my Facebook archive, and am looking for advice on which module I should be using to do so. I haven't dealt with HTML in years, and I've never dealt with XML. I just need to extract data within certain "class"es, regardless of the tag.

The header of the file looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w
+3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

[download]

...and here's a snip of the body:

<div class="message reply">

<span class="profile fn">Person Name</span>

<abbr class="time published" title="2012-03-14T21:37:16+0000">March 14
+, 2012 at 3:37 pm</span>
<div class="msgbody">

Message body here.

</div>
</div>

[download]

I could write something with regex and other trickery to pull the data I need, but I know there's people who have invented that wheel. I've taken a look at a few XML/HTML parsers, but I'm unsure with all the options which one would suit my basic extraction needs.

Can I get some feedback on which modules will help with this, with an easy to use interface (as this is pretty much a one-off)?

Thanks,

-stevieb

In reply to Recommendation on a module for HTML/XML extraction. by stevieb

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