Scraping Data from Web Viewer?

[habitude]

Howdy.

Is it possible to programmically scrape (or extract) road directions from the web viewer into a usable text format?

A scenario: Work Order is generated with customers name & address, work order #, job instructions, etc... and somewhere on the page it has directions to the job in a format like:

[Directions: From HQ, Drive South 2.5 Miles on First Avenue, Turn Left at First Signal, Proceed .5 Miles to Job at 2345 West Main Street]

Something like that. I figure if the web viewer can display a visual map on the screen, maybe there is a way to tap into the code that produces the road map, yeah?

Thanks in advance.

[Vaughan]

Yes, it can be done. But it's only effective if the directions are easily and uniquely identified in the html document. Otherwise it's a needle-in-a-haystack situation.

And if/when the web site changes their page, you're scraping will break.

I once did a screen scape for a client, and one of the tags had a typo in it (the developer spelled the tag wrong, like ). It worked for a few months until the developer "fixed" the spelling error, then my parsing code broke. :