[clt postings from jooky and David Welton and Larry Virden.]
Web scraping is the practice of getting information from a web page and reformatting it.
Some reasons one may do this is to send updates to a pager/WAP phone, etc. , email one's personal account status to an account, or create data files for reading on a PDA. See projects like http://Sitescooper.org/ or Plucker http://www.plkr.org/ for non-Tcl tools for scraping the web and http://www.Sitescraper.co.uk provide a reliable scraping service.
"Web Scraping ..." [L1 ]
Apt comments on the technical and business difficulty of Web scraping, along with mentions of WebL and NQL, appear here [L2 ].
An alternative to web scraping is to work with the web host to work out details of a Web Service that would provide useful information programatically.