Adrian Holovaty just released a tool for extracting templates from a sample set of HTML. What a clever idea! Rather than building a series of parsing rules for screen scraping, you can just give the tool the pages and look for differences. The differences become “holes” in the template. You can apply the template to other samples to extract the data. Super-clever.
I may give this a shot to automatically populate the Victim of Time show calendar from Myspace listings. Writing a Myspace concert screen scraper has been on my to do list for a while now. Templatemaker might make that a truly trivial task. Thanks Adrian.
You’re welcome, Chris.