I had to scrape the comments out of a blog. As you might expect, there was a div for comments, with comments nested within it. This made it easy to grab the c

I had to scrape the comments out of a blog. As you might expect, there was a div for comments, with comments nested within it. This made it easy to grab the comments using an HTML parser with xpath support. Unfortunately, the blog software had a bug and it was possible for markup to leak out of the comments. Sometimes a spurious </div> would close the comments div and the scraper would miss comments that came after it. However, the HTML did contain helpful HTML comments, something like "comments start here" and "comments end here". The reliable solution was to use a literal string search on these HTML comments to pull out the entire comments section, and then to use regexes to pull out the comments' content. The only unbreakable rule is that there are no unbreakable rules.