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Sure, everyone's time is free too, after all.

(Alternate smart-ass reply: Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)




I'm not the OP, but it looks like it was in reply to the "cheapest way" part of the title. Incidentally, that line doesn't appear on the web site.


> Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)

No because they were all free.

And I suck too.

But it was free.


https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

I mean...

soup.find(id="link3") # <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>

Is this hard?


For HN's audience, no, that's not hard. But this product is clearly not only for us, and you've also cherry-picked a very simple example.

There's also the aspect of downloading the page in the first place and dealing with things like authentication and bot detection which a product like this helps solve.

I personally don't have a use for this product right now, but I won't be so bold as to say I'll never find a case where using it wouldn't be easier or more cost-effective than hacking up my own solution.


Good, now do that on a page that uses JS and authentication. Trivial on this extension, not so much using BS.


If you show that to non-programmers they'll take one look at that and understand that about as well as egyptian hieroglyphics.

"Soup? Python? What's an 'id'? class? href? I just want to select the title!"




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