screenscrape

A slang verb, to screenscrape.

Screenscraping is a way of extracting data from a web page. It's based on parsing the HTML code of the page and extracting the required data using string parsing.

It is intrinsically more unreliable than an XML or RSS feed, since your code is more likely to break if the webpage's formating or content changes.

See wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenscraping

This technique is often used for mashups (see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 ).

See also web scraping


Category Internet Category Glossary