What Is Screen Scraping and How Does It Work?

Screen scraping is a data collecting technique usually used to copy information that shows on a digital display so it can be used for another purpose. In this article, we will introduce the process of screen scraping and how a screen scraper works.

Screen Scraping

Normally associated with the programmatic collection of visual data from a source, screen scraping usually refers to the practice of reading text data from a computer display terminal’s screen.

Screen Scrapers

A screen scraper is a computer program that uses a screen scraping technique to translate between legacy application programs (written to communicate with now generally obsolete input/output devices and user interfaces) and new user interfaces so that the logic and data associated with the legacy programs can continue to be used.

Extracting Data in A No-Code Way

Both web scraping and screen scraping techniques are valuable for data collection. The 2 techniques can be used at the same time to ensure you gather the right type of data properly. You can use web scraping to grab specific elements of a website, like URLs, texts, stats, etc., and export them into a JSON or excel file. Then, you can use a screen scraper to extract visual data, like graphs and charts.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Easy-to-use Movie Scraper | Scraping Movies from IMDb, Flixster, etc.

Revealing 3 Effective Methods to Export HTML Tables to Excel

A Comprehensive Walkthrough: Scraping and Cleansing eBay Product Data in Simple Steps