I have recently been given the task of assimilating a virtully unlimited number of webpages for certain bits of information that change from page to page. The good news is that all of the pages on a particular site are created by the same cgi script. The Bad news is that these templates differ between sites. I would like to create a program that would create functions specifically designed to to pull apart a particular page template. With a little user input (unless we could do with out it.)

Thus far I have been persuing a solution that would rely on enumerating the differences between two files. And the immediate context of those differances. My big hangup has been finding those differences AND getting their context. I have been fiddling with diff on the command line with some minor success. And I think with user input I could even roll out some regexes but I would really like to do this correctly. So I am calling on anyone with ideas to post to this thread. Thank you in advance.

-Douglas
Afterthought: I guess if diff produces whole lines instead of just the exact text that differs I could have the user input the text to be extracted and have the rest be the context. Oh Boy....

update (broquaint): dropped the <pre> tags and added formatting

In reply to Seeking input on pattern generation. by GermanHerman

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