[henrybaxter]

You can get the best of all worlds imo by using lxml, which supports the selectors you want, uses Python which I prefer, and in my experience lxml is more robust than BeautifulSoup.

I spent more than a year writing hundreds of scrapers that ran for weeks at a time. BeautifulSoup did not work out as well as lxml in practice. On extremely javascript heavy pages we used pyv8 actually.

edit: more information at http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/12/10/lxml-an-underappreciat... the comments are useful too.

[cdr]

Even better use Scrapy, which is a whole framework designed specifically for scraping and is built on top of libxml2 like lxml.

[krakensden]

Scrapy is overkill for nearly everything. You'll probably have under a page of code using lxml and urllib.

[cdr]

I have under a page of code with Scrapy for simple projects, and more advanced features when I need them.

That's like saying "jQuery is overkill for just about everything, you should use plain javascript".

[krakensden]

No, it's like saying "The full YUI suite is overkill for just about everything, you should just use the core or jQuery".

'scrapy startproject' creates a couple nested directories, with maybe seven files. Are you writing a scraper that you're going to run regularly? Does it need to be super robust and maintainable? Or are you writing something that you'll run once, maybe twice?

[cdr]

I seem to be missing why you think using a framework is a bad thing. With say django or YUI there are performance and abstraction issues that can bite you, but I don't see those mattering for so lightweight a framework and tightly scoped a problem.