Screen scraper

Stephen7372 said:
I'd like a screen scraper for www.thetrainline.com so I can pick up cheap train tickets. So it would look something like www.skyscanner.com/map.

Unfortunately I haven't a clue on how to do it or even where to start :( :confused:

Can anyone help ! Or just write it for me :)
Click to expand...

Heres a few links to get you started if your interested...

xhtml - http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp
css - http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
php - http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp
 
Screenscraping - the fast route to madness.
I have tried to write a general screenscraping application in both VB6 and vb.net and have found it to be incredibly frustrating. I managed to get it working on some sites but then try another site and it does not work. Change the application and try again and so on. There never seems to be an end point.
Also some sites use embedded scripts to get the data which is not available in the HTML source.
I am currently screenscraping Yahoo Finance for exchange rates and this is quite easy:-

Use WebClient to download the HTML source of the page into a string
Get a unique bit of text in the string (eg "Buy Rate") and position start index vbl to this point.
Use string handling to extract the data.
Do something with the extracted data

I think that you can get Firefox addons (iMacros) to do this manually, but I have not tried this.
I hope that this helps
 
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