What’s a good way to parse HTML in AppleScript?
I haven’t dabbled in AppleScript in quite some time, and even when I did it was very minimal and uninvolved, so I don’t really think naturally in the language quite yet. But I need to do some string manipulation and parse some HTML (basically some simple screen scraping).
Naturally, I’d like to avoid common pitfalls of HTML parsing. However, this is a temporary script and doesn’t need to be particularly robust or supportable. I really just need to scrape specific substrings (from a known starting substring to the next known character) into a file.
I’ve done plenty of string manipulation in C# and similar languages, but AppleScript is an interesting change of pace to say the least. Can somebody point me to some good resources (Google searches on this subject seem to have a high noise-to-signal ratio), or help me out with some sample code snippets?
The ultimate goal of what I’m doing is to take a pre-determined list of pages, open each one in Safari (I’m doing everything through tell application "Safari"), parse out links which fit a certain pattern, and store all of those links in a file. Then go through that file, open each of those links, parse out more links which fit another pattern, and store all of those links in a file.
(The site is actually owned by someone we’re working with, so don’t worry about me violating any terms of service or anything like that. But for reasons outside the scope of this question, I’m doing some page scraping in AppleScript.)
I can’t say enough good things about Matt Neuburg’s AppleScript: the Definitive Guide. Without a doubt the most complete documentation of AppleScript ever done. Matt’s also one of my favorite tech writers.