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I'm actually quite experienced with web scraping, mostly using PHP and XPath, but also with Javascript as well as a custom approach written in Rust. I know in d

I'm actually quite experienced with web scraping, mostly using PHP and XPath, but also with Javascript as well as a custom approach written in Rust. I know in detail what an inconsistent mess everything is. That's why I'm so uncomfortable handling things like bank transfers over such inconsistent, buggy systems, which is what Plaid does. It's not read-only: https://plaid.com/use-cases/consumer-payments/ https://plaid.com/use-cases/consumer-payments/ Not to say I don't trust Plaid, I'm sure they're aware of all this and very careful about how they do things.

meritt 7y ago
Then I feel like we're in agreement then that web scraping is a messy and imprecise art and the flexibility of a scripting language like PHP provides is immense. I have no affiliation with plaid, I've honestly only heard negative things about those guys, I was only empathizing with the difficulties in maintaining thousands of different scrapers and why I felt a scripting language provided far more latitude to get things done.