[roywiggins]

This works as long as you're really sure that the language you'll want to parse tomorrow will be regular also. It doesn't take much to accidentally add a new requirement that isn't, and once you've committed to regexps you may be tempted to break out the non-regular extensions that most regexp engines support, and that way lies madness.

Starting with a real HTML parser is a good way to future-proof your code for when someone asks you to add just one more thing.

[danpalmer]

That's true, although I've also seen scraping fail because it was being too precise – looking for something at a particular point in the DOM tree because the parser encourages things like XPaths or CSS selectors, where a regex would have been less brittle _for that use-case_.

For me this just highlights why it's important that engineers understand at some basic what these different things all mean, and what limitations you may have with your solutions, or even those you may want.