XPath/Screen Scraping Gurus..
Steve Horsley
steve.horsley at gmail.com
Mon Apr 17 17:39:34 EDT 2006
Peter Hansen wrote:
> bruce wrote:
>> I'm not that familiar with Pythin, but I wasn wondering if there are any
>> XPath/Python Gurus that I might be able to talk to regarding screen
>> scraping
>> applications...
>
> Since you mention XPath, it seems likely you are really interested in
> *web-scraping*.
>
> Screen-scraping refers, I believe, to the process of identifying what is
> onscreen in GUI programs, possibly even at the pixel level, and trying
> to translate that back into a higher level model (e.g. text in fields)
> of what is going on.
>
> Web-scraping, on the other hand, generally doesn't need to involve the
> graphic representation of anything, and can work at the level of HTML,
> XML, and ... XPath.
>
> (Disclaimer: I know these terms are not really standardized, but I think
> the defacto standard definitions match what I've described fairly closely.)
>
> -Peter
>
Back in the days of DOS when I first came across the term screen
scraping, it meant a program that emulated a terminal like a
VT100, sending keystrokes and reading from an internal screen
buffer. This was very much text and character oriented.
Steve
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