Web scraping

A common term for screen scraping is web scraping. Web scrapers generally go to web sites and scrape data from them, either piecemeal or by entire pages. screen-scraper is a web scraping tool that can get information from web sites very selectively or simply take whole pages, depending on what you need.

Extracting information from web sites is laborious if done by copying and pasting or by writing specialized scripts. screen-scraper dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to perform web scraping.

Examples of using screen-scraper for web scraping include:

• Search a real estate site by zip code and put information on properties listed into a database
• Scrape insurance rates so they can be compared and analyzed
• Automatically scrape data from different car web sites so that all the listings can be searched