Parsing HTML / Javascript into a MySQL database

Question

I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to parse the following calendar... http://www.ucd.ie/events/calendar . I can't detect any well known framework being used nor can I find it in RSS/XML/JSON format.

The only possible way to parse the following that I see is to parse the raw HTML which is far from ideal especially since many of the tags are repeditive.. a typical event looks like so..

    <tr> 
            <td class="odd"> 
                <a href="http://www.ucd.ie/events/calendar?dt=d.en.66031&amp;amp;f=week&amp;amp;d=19/10/2010&amp;amp;sd=Wednesday, 06 October 2010 - Wednesday, 01 December 2010&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null&amp;c=null">Exchange Information Talk</a> 
                <p class="description">Information for students on spending a period of study abroad on exchange as part of their UCD degree</p> 
            </td> 
            <td class="odd">UCD International</td> 
            <td class="odd">A105 Newman Building</td> 
        </tr>  

As you can see parsing many of these from a HTML page isn't going to be fun. Basically I'm wondering does anyone have any suggestions as to how I'd go about this? or perhaps a smarter way of doing things? I'd really appreciate any help as I'm stuck can't really find any alternatives.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If the site does not provide another service then this HTML, your stuck with parsing it, but XPATH queries can make your live a lot more pleasant then just plain string matching.

Answer 2

You can try it with xpath , to get the link you'll do

//td[@class='odd']/a/@href

but it's gone break every time they change the hmtl ouput