I used to make scrappers for living and trust me that it all depends on the particular situation and your requirements. Real HTML parsers are easier and safer f

I used to make scrappers for living and trust me that it all depends on the particular situation and your requirements. Real HTML parsers are easier and safer for general type of work, but they quickly get very heavy on memory when parsing big DOM trees. If all you need from a page is a few strings, like e.g. just a product price (very common task), using regexes is far superior approach performance-wise. It's both faster and uses less memory (so you can run more parallel workers) and also if you write it well it's immune to many small html/design changes as long as the pattern you look for is not changed.