I wrote a similar tutorial a while back using Python and BeautifulSoup (http://lethain.com/entry/2008/aug/10/an-introduction-to-compassionate-screenscraping/ ht

I wrote a similar tutorial a while back using Python and BeautifulSoup (http://lethain.com/entry/2008/aug/10/an-introduction-to-compassionate-screenscraping/ http://lethain.com/entry/2008/aug/10/an-introduction-to-comp...). BeautifulSoup doesn't learn in any sense of the word, but it plays very nicely with malformed (even extraordinarily malformed) html, and you can usually do things in a way that is resistant to changes (a combination of tag and id|class is usually fairly resistant to non-drastic changes).