Hello World!

Click here for a video version of this tutorial (this will open a new window which may take a moment to load)

This tutorial will walk you step-by-step through the process generally used to scrape information from web pages using screen-scraper. It should take you about 20 to 30 minutes to complete, and will familiarize you with the basic principles you'll need to scrape information from web sites. To get the most from this tutorial you should have at least a basic knowledge of HTML and HTTP (e.g., if you don't know the difference between a GET and POST request you ought to read through one of the HTTP articles below). This tutorial also assumes that you've successfully downloaded and installed screen-scraper.

If you don't have a lot of experience working with web technologies, or if you'd just like a refresher, you might find these sites helpful:

• HTTP Made Really Easy
• Understanding HTTP
• An HTML tutorial at W3Schools
• A JavaScript tutorial at W3Schools

This is intended to be a very basic tutorial, and, as such, we'll be extracting the words "Hello World" from a web page and writing them to a file. While this is a simple example of pulling a single snippet of text off of a page, you would use a very similar approach for something like a stock quote or product price.

We'll try to keep the pace of the tutorial such that (hopefully) you won't get bored or frustrated.

If you'd like to take a peek at the final product you'll be creating, you can download and import the scraping session below. If you're wanting to learn to use screen-scraper you're probably better off not importing the scraping session, and instead following along closely with the tutorial. If, however, you're just trying to get a feel for what it's like to use screen-scraper, it might be helpful to import the scraping session.