I spent two weeks fighting a website that refused to play nice. Every scrape came back with missing columns, merged cells, or data that looked right but was subtly wrong. I tried BeautifulSoup, regex, pandas read_html – all the usual suspects. Nothing worked reliably because the HTML was a nightmare of inline styles, rowspan attributes, and inconsistent class names.
Let me back up. I needed to pull apartment rental data from a dozen property management sites. Most were fine, but one particular site (let's call it ShadowListings) had a table that looked like this when rendered:
Unit
Price
Beds
