Extracting data from dynamic sites?

Creating automatically updating links to external data

[Kadence]

I'm not sure if this is the proper forum for this, because I don't really know what I'm talking about :) So sorry if it's not.

I was wondering how you could extract data from dynamic sites? For instance, say I wanted to put an automatically updating link on my site to the #1 ranking search term on: [buzz.yahoo.com...]

Or something similar to that. How would I go about doing this, and what language(s) can/should I use (e.g., PhP, JavaScript, XML)? Seems to me that this shouldn't be too tough...is that true, or is this actually a very complicated thing?

Thanks!

[PatomaS]

Hello

Well it depends on a lot of things...

Firts of all, the page you mention looks as pure html, no matter how it is generated, but the page you can see is just html and there is not any kind of xml or rss version, so you have to parse the page by your own.

So you must use php or perl to copy tha page into a temporal file and extract all the information you want to.

It is not very difficult, but takes a little bit of programming and testing...

:)

Good luck

Bye

[Kadence]

I was hoping there would be some more direct way; too bad. Thank you very much :)

[john_k]

The process you are describing is called a "screen scrape." So use that as part of your search query if you go looking for how-to's on this.