How can I identify primary article text when scraping news pages

I suspect this is a hard problem and that deep learning is the state of the art. But maybe I'm missing something?

Just to be clear, given the html of a wapo article I want to discard all the affiliate links/comments and focus on the article text. I want a generalized solution for many blogs and news sites.

Any tips?

2 comments

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tlack 5y ago ↗

I've had some good luck with "Unfluff"[0], a credible Node.js package that uses a cascade of logical conditions to figure out what to extract.

It's a very practical start.

I thought the science of it was called "envelope detection" but I'm not getting any relevant hits on that keyword. Will report back if I recall the name.

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/unfluff

nmstoker 5y ago ↗

You haven't give any details about programming language preferences but if you're interested in a Python approach then Newspaper3k is worth a look

https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper