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I need to screen scrape certain information from an interactive web application; more to the point I have to screen scrape that information from a Form once the user of that web application has submitted (POSTed presumably) that form.

What options or choices do I have for that?

The solution has to be minimally invasive i.e. I can't rely on Fiddler; it also needs to have a small footprint (i.e. I cannot install too many 3rd-party apps or tools to accomplish this).

The data that will be screen scraped will be tied together with a C# application that runs in the background on the desktop system. And this is a Windows-based desktop system.

I am completely open to non-C# based solutions e.g. Ruby, Python, etc. as long as the constraints above are met.

asked Jul 5, 2012 at 13:38
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2 Answers 2

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For c# there is htmlagilitypack, but if it were me I would use ruby mechanize or watir/selenium

answered Jul 5, 2012 at 23:23
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I'm not sure if I understood you correctly on your requirements, but since you know Ruby, I believe using Mechanize will be enough. It's a very powerful web automation library and easy to set up as well.

You can check this article on how to set it up on Windows:

http://webmites.org/ruby-mechanize-web-scraping-made-easy/

And you can refer to the Mechanize documentation here:

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/GUIDE_rdoc.html

answered Jul 6, 2012 at 7:31

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