Scraping Data off the Web

Ever since database-driven applications have been used to serve data on the web, users viewing that data have wanted to get at it programmatically. Whether it’s for automatically scouring an auction site for a hard to find classic Nintendo game or getting weather updates for your custom alarm clock application, you will probably start looking for a way to get that data into your program. In this blog post, I will cover a basic comparison of browsers vs. scrapers, and then dive into some code to show you how to write a simple scraper to get the rating of a…