Hi HN,
I’m here to shamelessly promote a recent side project. www.coparser.com, Basically, it can generate Python code to parse webpages. The underneath AI agent relies on analyzing 2–3 URLs, and examines both the visual structure and HTML to generate the Python code. I believe this tool could be beneficial for some developers.
1. If you’ve ever written a web crawler before, you know the frustrating and boring part is writing XPath or CSS selectors to extract values. This tool automates that process entirely.
2. While OpenAI/Claude can read images and extract data from screenshots directly, it’s often too expensive and slow, with response times ranging from 3 to 10 seconds. Pre-generated code can help reduce costs and improve speed. For example, processing a 1920x1081 screenshot via OpenAI would cost:
○ Total tokens: 36,835
○ Total price: $0.005525
3. Beyond web scraping, I think there are other scenarios where low-cost and high-speed parsing is needed.
I’ve done a few weeks of coding, but there are still some issues to resolve. The website is open to try ,
www.coparser.com
let me know if it is broken . However, before investing more time and money into buying proxies, adding new features and improving infrastructure, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Do you think this idea is valuable?
Would you consider paying for a similar service?
Any advice or insights on how to improve the tool ?
I’d be happy to hear your feedback!