News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other bash commands. Parent comment

Re:Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and ... by elmigranto on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @12:29AM (#12295543)
I mostly agree, been using Regexes to parse known limited subset of HTML tags in known limited format (1 tag per line, forced padding, no attrs, etc.).

But on the other hand, this is often how long term "proper" solutions are born — evolved from something cobbled together in couple of hours.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and ... by taneq on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:11AM (#12295661)
Oh yeah, the golden rule for quick hacks is NEVER show them to someone non-technical, especially someone non-technical who's in your chain of command.

I learned that one after mocking up some UI screens using VB6 and then having to explain over and over again that no, just because we showed you some buttons on a page doesn't mean that the program (which had to be a Java applet, mind you) was "almost done."

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and ... by jpatokal on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:03AM (#12295982)
There are already literally dozens of "proper" MediaWiki parsers out there: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
[ Parent | on HN ]