What is a Screen Scraper?
A screen scraper is a computer program that collects character-based data from the display output of another program. Screen scrapers can extract the data they are looking for and present it in a richer format, such as with graphs or tables, or simply index the data for storage. There are many other names for a screen scraper, including web site scraper, content miner, web site ripper, web extractor, automated data collector, and HTML scraper. A screen scraper will search through the code of a website and filter out the extraneous code that is in place to provide a nice-looking presentation to the end browser. Such code is necessary to view the entire page in its intended layout, but a scraper is simply looking for useful data. This data is collected and presented as a simple database, without the bells and whistles the original HTML code provided. A good example of a screen scraper in action is with search engine spiders. These spiders access hundreds of thousands of websites, which e
A. You probably already have some idea of what it is or you wouldn’t be reading this. A screen scraper is simply a programming script, service or other automated method that collects information from a webpage or other data source and returns it in an appropriate format for different needs. Once the data is collected or harvested, a screen scraper may include additional code for analyzing the data. Screen scrapers may also be known as data scrapers, web scrapers, page scrapers, content scrapers, data harvestors, bots, agents, crawlers, spiders, indexers and probably a two dozen other names.
