Screen Scraping

Is it possible to read text via screen scraping

[IanTurner]

If you do a screen scrape of the currently displayed screen - is it then possible to extract the text from the content of the file?

[Longhaired Genius]

It probably is, with text recognition software. Maybe you've got some if you have a recent flatbed scanner. I've never done it, so that's all I know.

[Staffa]

Ian, what is a screen scrape?

Thanks

[veritysystems]

Do you mean 'print screen'? If so it is saved in a graphical format.

[IanTurner]

Screen scraping is extracting information off of the currently displayed screen.

[veritysystems]

OK - well if you press 'print scrn' Windows will create a screen grab (nothing will happen on the screen).

Open a graphics editor and hit paste. Hey presto - the screen will be recreated as an image. As to extracting the data, I'm not sure.

[korkus2000]

How are you scrapping the screen?

[veritysystems]

You could create a PDF from the image....upload it to the web and wait for Google to turn it into text HTML for you!

[IanTurner]

That is a little outside of the timescales that are needed here, we are looking at performing some data capture work within seconds rather than days.

[korkus2000]

Ian how are you scrapping. Are you changing it into a graphic? If so what format?

[john316]

Are you scraping web pages or something else on your screen?

[IanTurner]

At the moment we are looking at scraping web pages only and converting to a bitmap (this being the easiest to do).

[veritysystems]

OK - so does anyone know how to turn a bitmap into text?

Is this possible?

[korkus2000]

You will have to find ocr software that you can script to run on the fly.

[Staffa]

Thanks for the explanation Ian.

Screen scraping is extracting information off of the currently displayed screen.

However I'm still confused.
Let's say its a page like this one and you want to catch all the text you could just save the page or select all, copy and paste into notepad.

I guess I'm missing something here :o

[IanTurner]

Yes you can, staffa, however if you save a page like this and it has a java applet or flash in it all you get is a link to the applet or the flash, you don't get to save the current information as the next time you open the page you will get the latest information pulled by the applet or the flash movie.

[Staffa]

Thank you Ian, now I understand what you mean :)