Screen scraping or better method

[Steve Long]

Hello,
I currently have an app that accesses a web page and I scrape the screen and
parse the returned text to find the elements I want off of the page. My
question, is this a good method of doing this or is there a better method of
getting at particular elements of a web page? Is there a way to use the DOM
for this?

Steve

 

[Larry Lard]

Hello,
I currently have an app that accesses a web page and I scrape the screen and
parse the returned text to find the elements I want off of the page. My
question, is this a good method of doing this or is there a better method of
getting at particular elements of a web page? Is there a way to use the DOM
for this?

My now-usual mention for the htmlAgilityPack
<http://blogs.msdn.com/smourier/archive/2003/06/04/8265.aspx> - give it
(even malformed) HTML, get back a nice clean XML document that you can
interrogate with XPath or whatever you favourite XML-querying method is

 

[Steve Long]

Thanks Larry. After I posted this I realized that I had written a Web
Service that handled the parsing of a web page and delivered back a well
formed XML string. However, the nice thing about this is, I could use this
and insulate the clients of the web service from any changes if I want to
add some limited functionality. Sweet.

Steve