I've found in my data-mining experience that the most interesting data (at least on the Web) is not particularly easy to parse, even if you write something that automates a form's POST submissions. The second difficult part is normalizing it, as much web/text data is formatted for display to humans, which is quite different than data in easily analyzable form.

So given that, it's just worth learning enough program to do loops, conditionals, and regexes to get what you want.