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It's a shame we don't have something like Beautiful Soup for .NET or C or any other of a dozen languages -- it would have made this article more applicable.

But the thrust is good -- for easy-to-describe yet tough-to-implement problems, always steal somebody else's work if you can

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There's a port for Ruby, Rubyful Soup http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/

Apparently it's slower, though. I've only used the python version, which works very well if you use it with the old SGMLParser.

UPDATE:

For those of you doing .NET, the HtmlAgilityPack looks very interesting. You can search using multiple paradigms such as XPath, XSLT, and Linq

http://www.codeplex.com/htmlagilitypack

Ruby has two popular HTML parsers, Nokogiri and Hpricot, both of which are awesome and fast.

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