Screen scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of another program. The program doing the scraping is called a screen scraper. The key element that distinguishes screen scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for final display to a human user, rather than as input to another program, and is therefore usually neither documented nor structured for convenient parsing. Screen scraping often involves ignoring binary data (usually images or multimedia data) and formatting elements that obscure the essential, desired text data. Optical character recognition software is a kind of visual scraper.
There are a number of synonyms for screen scraping, including: Data scraping, data extraction, web scraping, page scraping, web page wrapping and HTML scraping (the last four being specific to scraping web pages).
Screen scraping generally requires intensive text parsing algorithms. Computer languages that have strong support for regular expressions and other text processing are thus a popular choice for writing screen scraping programs.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_scraping
There are a number of synonyms for screen scraping, including: Data scraping, data extraction, web scraping, page scraping, web page wrapping and HTML scraping (the last four being specific to scraping web pages).
Screen scraping generally requires intensive text parsing algorithms. Computer languages that have strong support for regular expressions and other text processing are thus a popular choice for writing screen scraping programs.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_scraping