Parsers

Parsers is a graphical user interface for text parsing operations. Developed by the same guy as produced the excellent Journler software is is likely to progress well. Although much of the functionality is usually accomplished by scripting and langages like perl manage this very well that approach isn't for everyone. The GUI is nice and the functionality looks good. The application is described like this

Parses is “drag and drop text parsing and data mining”. The app is designed to help you preprocesses data so that you’re left with only the information you need in a format you can easily apply elswhere. In a visual environment you create and test re-usable, rules based documents for parsing well formatted text.

For example, let’s say you want to download your local weather information from an online feed. The temperature, conditions and forecast change by the hour but the html in which that information is contained otherwise stays the same. That is, the relevant information or variables change but the format remains constant. Parsers helps you extract the temperature, conditions and forecast from the feed so that you can use the information elsewhere, in a widget, your own webpage or a spreadsheet for example.

I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, but it looks interesting for small repetitive tasks.