Before anyone starts talking about doing HTML scraping these days, it's always important to ask the question, "Is there a better way to do this?". The answer, direct from Yahoo, is yes, yes there is. Use web APIs, not HTML scraping (and YQL is your friend). This way, if Yahoo changes the syntax of their HTML (which can happen at a moment's notice), your tool will continue working.
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Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
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Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
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Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
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Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
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