2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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screen scraping
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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v. The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the
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contents of some display that is not actually intended for data transport or
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inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to tricks like
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reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its auxiliary port.
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Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with
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programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content. In either
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guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very
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likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being
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snooped.
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