Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every... by chucksmash on Friday February 08, 2019 @12:54PM (#19116828)

+1. At a previous employer we fed images of interest from the web into Google's OCR API to see what we could see. In addition to scene descriptions, the API will transcribe any text it detects.

With all the easy to use tools available to programmers today, it would not be terribly hard to use OCR on a screenshot to find the text of interest and derive the scraping code by searching for the OCR'd text in the markup.

If none of your extant parsers can extract the info you want from the page, send it to OCR pipeline (or, hell, Mechanical Turk) and generate a new one.

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Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every... by folkhack on Friday February 08, 2019 @02:32PM (#19117833)

Yep yep - if the text isn't distorted I can rip it from an image within minutes using pre-built OCR libraries. If the text is distorted there's full-blown API-driven services for solving CAPTCHAs and the like.

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Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every... by TimothyBJacobs on Friday February 08, 2019 @05:56PM (#19119468)

It seems like a time span of minutes wouldn't be fast enough for on-the-fly blocking of sponsored posts?

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Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every... by folkhack on Friday February 08, 2019 @06:03PM (#19119497)

Oh yea - I guess I had a specific use case in mind when I said that =)

What I meant is that I can hammer out some Node/Python that will grab an image w/text and put it through OCR for character extraction. "Programming" it would take me a handful of minutes.

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Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every... by TimothyBJacobs on Saturday February 09, 2019 @01:05PM (#19123648)

Ahh, that makes sense!

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