screen-scraper 2.7.2 review

screen-scraper project is a tool used to extract data from web sites

License: Free To Use But Restricted File size: 65151K Developer: ekiwi

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screen-scraper project is a tool used to extract data from web sites. You might use screen-scraper for the following purposes:

Data Mining and Extraction
Data Migration
Application Integration
Business Intelligence
Web Task Automation
Portal Components
Meta-Searching
Archiving

The screen-scraper application consists of two primary pieces:

Workbench: A graphical user interface provides an intuitive approach that allows you to designate pages and specific pieces of information to be extracted.
Server: After using the workbench to designate the data to be scraped, screen-scraper can be run in a server mode, much like a database. External applications can then connect to screen-scraper, which will pull data off of the designated web sites, then return them to the calling application. For example, you might build a web-based application using Active Server Pages (ASP) or PHP that invokes screen-scraper to search for products found on an external web site in real-time.

Additionally, screen-scraper can be started in a non-graphical mode from the command line such that it can be scheduled or invoked on-demand.

screen-scraper can automate many of the tasks typically required when scraping data from web pages, such as tracking cookies, logging in to web sites, and traversing search results pages.

Depending on the programming languages and platforms you most prefer, screen-scraper is likely to be familiar to you. screen-scraper contains an internal scripting engine that supports:

VBScript
JScript
Perl
Interpreted Java
JavaScript
Python

When invoking screen-scraper externally take your pick from the following languages:

Java
PHP
Anything COM-based (such as Active Server Pages, Visual Basic, and Visual C++)
.NET (both Microsoft-based and Mono)
Cold Fusion

What's New in This Release:
This release fixes a particularly annoying bug that slipped into version 2.7 related to running from the command line. It also contains a few other minor bugfixes.