The Daily WTF

April Fool’s Day happened over the weekend, which means no April Fool’s Day post. I mean, I could have, but instead, I thought it would be fun to look into something that, once upon a time, wasn’t a WTF, but honestly, always should have been.

Our story starts with Jake, a relatively modern web developer, who was helping another developer, Jane, build a site-scraper for a local government’s site. See, the government site couldn’t be bothered with anything like RSS, so if you wanted a list of upcoming events, notifications, or other information, your only option was to load the page manually, or whip up a site-scraper that automated extracting that information.

The problem was, Jane was finding some absolute nonsense in the HTML of the page, and it was incredibly difficult to parse out the information they were looking for. “What? How hard could this possibly be?” Jake wondered.

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