Parsing data from a website

The lynx, sed, and awk commands can be used to mine data from websites. You might have come across a list of actress rankings in a Searching and mining text inside a file with grep recipe in Chapter 4, Texting and Driving; it was generated by parsing the http://www.johntorres.net/BoxOfficefemaleList.html web page.

How to do it...

Let's go through the commands used to parse details of actresses from the website:

$ lynx -dump -nolist \
    http://www.johntorres.net/BoxOfficefemaleList.html
    grep -o "Rank-.*" | \
    sed -e 's/ *Rank-\([0-9]*\) *\(.*\)/\1\t\2/' | \
    sort -nk 1 > actresslist.txt

The output is as follows:

# Only 3 entries shown. All others omitted due to space limits
1   Keira Knightley...