I want to write a computer program that would scan a set of webpages and find predetermined criteria. Example: a program that searches all Dallas craigslist listings containing "honda civic" and records the percentage of those listings which contain "fast and furious".

What language should I look into learning?

Or, frankly, do you feel that such an undertaking is ludicrously ambitious for someone with my programming experience (very little, years ago)?

 

i haven't done it, but it doesn't seem to be too difficult. at least the searching part. i'm not too familiar w/web stuff so i'm not sure how you would traverse every available listing.

however, if you were to get that list...you could probably use any language to read the page in as text, then some sort of instr() function to see if it has your desired text. might be a little slow, though...haha. sorry good luck.

 

Use google?

 

so you're talking about a web crawler going to sites and picking up page statistics? you need to write yourself a web crawler first, then you need to store your website data (whatever you're collecting) in some form of simple dB or file structure... not ridiculously complicated but just offhand i don't know how i'd go about it. i wrote a simple word search program that would index all the words in a text file and give you a word count on them back in college, that part is pretty simple. the web crawler is a bit more complicated. i've never written something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

as for what language, i dunno. there's plenty of options. download a freebie version of visual studio or download one of the many free java IDEs. mess around. google is your friend as far as learning the languages and figuring out what free code is out there that you might be able to use.

 

I agree, I don't think the language you choose really matters