Last month, I had to scrape product data from a dozen e-commerce sites. Each site had its own HTML structure, inconsistent CSS classes, and the worst part? The product descriptions were nested inside a dozen different containers. I did what any sane developer would do: I reached for regex.
Three days later, I had a pile of brittle patterns that worked for one site, failed for another, and broke the moment the page layout changed by a single <div>. I was this close to giving up and hiring a VA to copy-paste data.
Then it hit me: Instead of trying to describe the pattern explicitly, why not show an AI a few examples and let it figure out the rest?
What I tried that didn't work
1. Pure CSS selectors
