I hope I have given you a taste of how Python can be a very effective tool to parse information from the Internet. In this case, this simple program, written in 2 days with no prior knowledge of Python, has saved Memphis Scholastic Chess over 70 hours to date in the 3 months that it has been implemented. Python combines ease of use with the ability to run on multiple platforms and provides a rich library that makes the tasks that are simple in theory (downloading a web page, parsing an HTML file, showing a window on the screen, etc.) simple in practice. I strongly urge you to try out Python. Stay tuned for the next article, wherein I'll create a cross-platform GUI to run on top of our data parsing application!

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