There are a few variations on CSV, but a great many variations on HTML. You could try to hack together some sort of quick and dirty regular expression based ext

There are a few variations on CSV, but a great many variations on HTML. You could try to hack together some sort of quick and dirty regular expression based extractor, but if I were you I'd use http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/. It does a reasonably good job of parsing HTML, even invalid HTML such as is often found in the wild. Then it should be pretty straightforward to scrape out the data you want. The scraper will be reasonably resilient and because the parsing code is separate from the code that deals with the structural details of the data source you're dealing with, it will be reasonably easy to maintain that when the provider redesigns their web pages.