This is one I've never quite understood. Having written many scrapers I will say - Scraping is always hard to maintain. I've written regex and parser based scra

This is one I've never quite understood. Having written many scrapers I will say - Scraping is always hard to maintain. I've written regex and parser based scrapers many times, but it's still a need for constant updates as the page changes. HTML will change about as often (only slightly less in my experiences) than regexes will need to be changed and can take more time to test and develop on each update, especially if you don't have access to a very durable parser which can stand broken HTML, unlike most XML parsers. So if a regex does the job, use it IMO.