While I agree with the answer. What most people take from it is don't use Regex to scrape data from HTML. Which isn't exactly the point of it. Parsing HTML and scraping are two different things.

If you know the exact HTML you are working with, using regex to extract the data is in my opinion a superior way of doing it. Less lines and generally less complexity. (Such as taking the name and id of an amazon product from a single site is different from taking all the links out of any page given.)

With today's widely available DOM manipulation tools (jsdom, phantom, zombie) and proper HTML parsers in javascript there is absolutely no reason to use RegExps.

> (jsdom, phantom, zombie) and proper HTML parsers in javascript

Well, for starters, if you're not using Javascript. All four tools you mentioned are Javascript-based.

There is an XPath implementation for everything under the sun now - I saw and used one even in Erlang - and such an implementations beats regexes in readability and loc 9 times out of 10.

The only real reason to use regexes is when dealing with html so broken that parts of it are inaccessible through parser.

On the other hand, the world would really benefit from someone updating the libxml2 HTML parser to match the HTML(5) spec, since it has popular bindings for many other languages (e.g. lxml in python). The current implementation is broken in lots of (not so) edge cases. This can be a problem when there is the choice of being fast and wrong (using libxml2) or being slow and correct (using html5lib or one of the other high level implementations of the standardised algorithm).

The renew is for the subscription license for upgrades. With some of the applications you can get all the updates for free for a year and then you would have to buy a new subscription if you want newer versions if you don't want to pay any more you can continue to use the version you have until the end of the world.