Tutorials

Before diving in to screen-scraper we highly recommend that you take some time to go through our tutorials. Each tutorial should take around 30 minutes. The five current tutorials cover all of the basics of using screen-scraper, and should be adequate to get you going on most projects. Along with these tutorials you'll probably find it helpful to look through our documentation.

Tutorial 1: Hello World. This first tutorial will familiarize you with the basics of using screen-scraper and the general approach we recommend in setting up sites to be scraped.

Tutorial 2: Extending Hello World. The second tutorial builds off of the first, and covers topics such as richer scripting and interacting with screen-scraper from languages such as Active Server Pages, PHP, and Java.

Tutorial 3: Scraping an E-commerce Site. This tutorial covers scraping search results that span multiple pages, using extractor patterns, and logging in to a web site.

The rest of the tutorials build off of Tutorial 3, and can be done in any order. They're intended to give examples of more specific tasks you might want to accomplish with screen-scraper. Feel free to read through them and try any that best fit your situation.

Tutorial 4: Scraping an E-commerce Site from External Programs. Here we extend Tutorial 3 with specific examples of invoking screen-scraper from Java, Active Server Pages, PHP, and .NET.

Tutorial 5: Saving Scraped Data to a Database. This tutorial illustrates how to take the data we scraped from our e-commerce site and insert it into a database.

Tutorial 6: Generating an RSS/Atom Feed from a Product Search. Here we go over creating an XML feed based on a serach on our shopping site to demonstrate screen-scraper's RSS/Atom capabilities.

Tutorial 7: Scraping a Site Multiple Times Based on Search Terms. A common scenario in screen-scraping is submitting a form multiple times and extracting the search results. A common example is a "store locator" service where you submit many zip codes, then extract out the various locations corresponding to those zip codes. This tutorial walks you through how to use screen-scraper to tackle such a task.

If you'd like to print the tutorials for easier reading, you may also download them all as a PDF here.