My first job involved a lot of web scraping and general data munging in PHP, so we accomplished it with a combination of XPath and regexes. Mostly XPath, with r

My first job involved a lot of web scraping and general data munging in PHP, so we accomplished it with a combination of XPath and regexes. Mostly XPath, with regex getting us through any particularly thorny bits of data we couldn't easily XPath out. I had also done a tiny amount of regex in a college programming course, but really I didn't get "good" at them until I used them on the job.