Invoking screen-scraper from the Command Line

Scraping sessions created within screen-scraper can be invoked by running screen-scraper from a Unix terminal or a DOS command prompt. This allows for possibilities such as scraping information at regular intervals via something like cron or a scheduled task. The syntax is as follows:

Note that if you installed a version of screen-scraper that includes a Java Virtual Machine (currently Windows and Linux), you'll want to preface the command with "jre\bin\" on Windows or "jre/bin/" on Linux. On Windows, for example, the full command above would be:

or:

Where {screen-scraper-install-folder} is the location where you installed screen-scraper, such as "C:\Program Files\screen-scraper professional edition\".

Here are a couple of examples:

This would invoke the scraping session "Google search" and pass in a parameter named search_string containing the value screen scraper (remember that the passed-in parameters need to be a URL-encoded string, just like the query string in a URL). This would cause a session variable named "search_string" to be created, which would hold the value "screen scraper".

This one would invoke the scraping session Hotmail mail retrieval and pass in two parameters, one named user_name containing the value "uname" and the other named password containing the value "mypass". Again, two session variables would be created.

Note also that, when running on Windows, any % character needs to be doubled because this character is treated in a special way in DOS. For example, the parameter "string=hello%21" would need to be passed in as "string=hello%%21".