screen scraping

1 definition found

screen scraping - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  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.