World: r3wp

The particular script I am writing is called GET ADDRESS.  This script 
takes a CSV file called contacts which has first and last name, city 
and state of all of my friends that I'd like to get addresses for 
Christmas cards, but have forgotten or misplaced.


So far, the script takes each entry and sends it to SUPERPAGES.com 
where the HTML sent back contains the information.  Right now, I'm 
simply saving the HTML as a file for each entry in my CSV.


What I would like to do is somehow parse the HTML from it and extract 
out the address lines, zip code, phone number etc.  But I admit that 
parsing through HTML is daunting to me.  So after looking around 
on the internet, I discovered HTML-TO-TEXT in your Power Mezz.  


That is where I am now, trying to figure it out and see how it works. 
 I've read some of your documentation, but I admit, I am still in 
the dark as to how it works -- at least for my application.  Any 
advice you have is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

I don't think that's a good function to use for that. It seems to 
me it's meant for making readable text, not processable text

Use "5.10 Parse HTML text into a tree" instead

Thank you Kaj.  I'll check that out!

There's no usage documentation, though, only code documentation

There's also "7.4 [X][HT]ML Parser" so it's not clear to me which 
one is preferred

To be honest, if you just like to parse some HTML page to get some 
parts of it, you don't need to use Power Mezz at all.. I'm using 
Rebol more than 10 years and still consider PM as a too complex staff 
for me. If you are REBOL newbie, better to start reading REBOL doc. 
In your case something about parsing.

There is a lot of pages about 'parse' on net... for example this 
one: http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-15.html

Thanks Oldes -- Will check into that

Yeah, there's some tipping point in parsing web pages and such. When 
the pages are consistent and the data you want to scrape is simple, 
I use PARSE, too, or even just string processing

But when the HTML and the data become more complex, there are so 
many exceptions you have to program, that a real HTML parser becomes 
more convenient

would a real HTML parser convert the data to a REBOL object?

hmm... not sure that is possible.

I don't know what the two PowerMezz ones do, but I figure they just 
produce blocks. It's static data, so no need for bindings

a good one would be to convert R3 rich text to HTML and vice versa.

but that is of course not related to parsing...

Yeah, I think someone will have to do that :-)

Kaj, I think it's the other way around! I found when the HTML and 
the data become more complex, then a simpler "hack" parse job is 
more likely to survive changes to the source. This happened to me 
several times with a weather forecast and television guide scraper 
etc. that I made (and remade, and remade..).

(back when I used to care about television, that is)

That's true when you have to write the parser yourself, but I'm assuming 
the PowerMezz parsers handle all of HTML :-)

Also, it's probably not as much within reach for novice programmers

I was using REBOL for datamining a few years ago and I can say it 
was easier to do string based parsing to get what I've needed.

It's always easier to do:  parse html [thru "<title>" copy title 
to "<"]  than parse complete html to something like a block structure 
and dig title in it.

For you, but my business partner wants to scrape web pages, and I 
don't think he would understand how to do it with parse

I believe that if he would not understand simple parse, than he would 
not understand PowerMezz as well, but maybe I'm wrong. Also it very 
depends what page do you parse.

Scraping a title is the simplest example. In reality, you get all 
sorts of tags with extra attributes that you need to skip, and values 
with extraneous newlines. He wouldn't understand how to normalise 
that, so his data would be left as a mess

Again... it's easier to do manual changes to parse malformed pages 
if you do string parsing where you don't care about 99% of the page 
content.

We did a simple address list as an example, even preconverting it 
to plain text. It took all afternoon to discover all exceptions and 
fix them, so in most cases, it isn't worth it

I've done quite a few html analysers and with a bit of experience 
I have found that going with a brute force parse on pages ends-up 
being very effective.  I did a font downloading script for www.acidfonts.com 
a few years ago and it took more time to actually download all the 
pages than build the script.  :-)

some servers are anti-indexing and its in these cases where the brute 
parse is most effective.  I've even had to cater an oracle web server 
which didn't have ANY css, type, or id fields in all pages which 
are driven by form.  all urls can only be read once, and every page 
read is a redirect.   


only parse allowed me to cope in such a drastic anti-robot  environment. 
 it still took a day to build the robot.  and in the end, it even 
had an auto-user-creationg step at each 200 pages which created a 
google gmail account for the next batch.  :-)

in those cases, parse is king.

a fellow REBOL parse data miner tells me that some servers have pretty 
good algorithms which identify robots out of the thousands of requests 
they get, and you even have to put random-lenght pauses between reads 
which can go up to a few hours.

I don't see my partner doing that :-)

that why he has you  ;-)

I'm not going to do it for him, either, thank you very much

So if he can get by with an HTML parser, that would be great for 
him

About examples: if you download the repository, or the source archive, 
you'll find a test directory which has the test suite for (almost) 
all the modules. the tests are often usable as "examples" for how 
to use the modules themselves.

About the HTML parser:


This started out because we had a need for a HTML filter. The mail 
client in Qtask allows users to view HTML emails, furthermore, the 
wiki editor submits HTML to Qtask. Whenever you are embedding HTML 
from an external (untrusted) source within your HTML, you have security 
problems. For this reason, we had to take the untrusted HTML and 
1) "filter" it so that it would be safe 2) make it embeddable (eg. 
only take what's inside <body>, and not the whole <html> etc.).

This *had* to work with *any* HTML (think about the stuff that comes 
out of Outlook, or the stuff you get as spam, or newsletters, and 
all that). You can't imagine how bad that can be. That had to be 
turned into something that would not break our own HTML pages.

My approach was, instead of doing what many others do (try to remove 
things from the HTML that are known to be "bad", eg. use regexps 
to remove anything that starts with "javascript:" or anything between 
<script>...</script> etc.), was to only pass what was known to be 
good, and ignore everything else. This is a bit more limiting but 
I consider it to be safer (you don't have to play a game with attacker 
where every time they find a new vector, you have to add it to the 
"bad" list).

So the first HTML filter was done. It parsed the HTML (any version), 
and going through two finite state machines in a pipeline, rebuilt 
it as XHTML 1.0 strict.

This method avoided keeping any intermediate representations in memory. 
However, because of that there were a number of things it could not 
do (eg. no look ahead, and you get an explosion of the number of 
states if you want to "look behind" more).

So, as our needs became more complex (esp. because of the initial, 
never released version of the wiki editor), I had to change approach. 
Also, at that time Maarten was doing the S3 stuff and needed a XML 
parser as well.


So, first, the Filter was split up into three modules. The first 
is the parser, that takes a HTML or XML string and just sends "events" 
to a callback function. This can be used basically for anything. 
(Maarten never used it in the end.) The second part was the first 
FSM, the HTML normalizer. You'll still find it within the Power Mezz, 
but it's deprecated. The third part was the actual filter and regenerator 
(second FSM). You can find it in the repository history.

Then, the latter two modules were replaced by a different approach 
that builds a tree of blocks from the HTML and rewrites it as it 
is being built (to avoid doing too many passes). This is done by 
LOAD-HTML, that allows passing a set of rules used for filtering 
(so the actual filter is now a bunch of rules for LOAD-HTML). LOAD-HTML 
handles a lot of HTML weird cases, it's probably not at the level 
of a web browser, but it comes close.

The tree is being built with the Niwashi module, which was separated 
as a generic way to build trees incrementally following rules etc. 
(Niwashi means gardener in Japanese)

The HTML to text module has still not been rewritten to use LOAD-HTML 
instead of the older approach of the HTML normalizer followed by 
a FSM.

Thanks for the clarification

So the parser in 5.10 is the newest one? But where does the parser 
in 7.4 fit in?

7.4 parses a string into a sequence of tags and text (etc.). (it 
also has a load-markup function that is similar to load/markup but 
also parses tag attributes and so on). 5.10 uses 7.4 and builds a 
tree from that sequence of tags and text.

(i never got around to change wetan to show module dependencies. 
if you look at the script header though, you'll see that load-html.r 
depends on ml-parser.r)

http://www.rebol.it/power-mezz/mezz/load-html.r