Either with a regular expression or with a parser.

Google recently released Gumbo, an HTML5 parser in C.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2013/08/gumbo-c-library-for-parsing-html.html

https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser

Similar software:

http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/

http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/

http://dzaebel.net/MshtmlParser.htm

Regards,

Joachim

use python with beautifulsoup just make a URL request with python and parse it with beautifulsoup for the needed element. makes life much easier than you believe

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/