When Regex Fails: LLMs for Messy HTML Data

Last month I inherited a project that needed to extract product information from a legacy e‑commerce site. The HTML was a nightmare—no semantic classes, inconsistent attribute names, and the occasional blob of inline JavaScript. I thought I could just write a few regular expressions and be done in an hour. Six hours later I was staring at a wall of conditional logic that broke every time the page changed. I needed a better way, and I ended up using a large language model (LLM) to handle the fuz...