Here's the thing: I was looking at playing around with some basic website spidering/parsing for interesting things. However, I only want to parse the actual content and most of the sites I'm looking at (Typically news type sites, reuters, theregister, that sort of thing) have lots of generic content on each page, such as titles, menus and so forth.

So the question is: how do ensure you just get the actual content and not the layout? I don't think there's any real definite answer for this sort of thing, which is why I'm posting in meditations, but perhaps someone will suprise me.

The only solution I've come up with so far is try to visit multiple pages, format them all the same and then diff them to find the common features, but this sounds a tad buggy and hard to do. Anyone have a better idea?

In reply to How would you extract *content* from websites? by BUU

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.