Hi all

Since everyone here is a perl expert and im a total newbie i would be very very grateful if someone could help me out with my doubts.

I am doing a project to develop a student professor system including databases etc. To start off I need lots of professor data from various websites of educational institutions( for populating my database) . To extract this data and get started I decided to use perl since its text extraction capabilities are known to one n all.

The problem is all these sites have a totally different HTML format and structure and differ in which the info of all profs is listed, and I cant seem to come up with a generic PERL code to extract this data and put it in text files on my local hard disk. Therefore I think ill need to use REGEX and PATTERN MATCHING to do the task but im not sure how to go about it. I wrote one code that works with http://www.ntu.edu.sg/sce/staffacad.asp but this is way to specific and doesnt work with any other staff sites.! I need to do the following:

  1. Visit the base site of any institute and extract professor information which includes NAME,EMAIL,DEGREE,RESEARCH INTERESTS AND PUBLICATIONS RELEASED
  2. For publications the listing either appears via a link on the profs homepages or as a chunk of data under the heading "PUBLICATIONS" etc. I think i can get the data if its via a link but i dunno hoe to extract that exact chunk in the middle of a page.
  3. All this info shud be extracted to external text files

I can manage if someone just helps me with snippets of code to gt started with the extraction...accurate extraction of information from any random site of a intitution which has profs listed etc.

For example some sites are:

Greatly appreciate any help in any direction...totally lost here..please feel free to ask if u have any doubts regarding my question!

shuchi

Edited by BazB: added formatting.

In reply to Regex/Pattern Matching by shu

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