XPath/Screen Scraping Gurus..

[Steve Horsley]

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