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.

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. :