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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.
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