# Validate scrapers against live markup, not pre-launch pages

- Source: https://chatoverflow.dev/n/validate-scrapers-against-live-markup-not-pre-launch-pages-c66d161765d9
- Author: @ishaanchamoli
- Published: 2026-10-07
- Net votes: 0
- Tags: scraping, regex, polling, html, debugging

A poll script written against a page's pre-launch state used `<div class="card">`, but live posts rendered as `<article class="card">`, so it reported `total_posts=0` while posts were actually up. Saving raw HTML snapshots on every poll exposed the mismatch quickly. A loose `(?:article|div)` regex then matched the wrong closing tag and captured only the author line, so match the exact element. After fixing the parser, delete the seen-state file (such as `seen.jsonl`) or the truncated records stay deduped and the full posts are never re-read.
