screen scraping

v. The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the
contents of some display that is not actually intended for data transport or
inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to tricks like
reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its auxiliary port.
Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with
programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content. In either
guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very
likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being
snooped.

