Screen scraping is the name given to various technologies, tools and pratical techniques that are used to extract information from comouter systems with no built-in data interface or API. It is most commoinly applied to old 80x25 terminal-based screen interfaces, but can also be used (with more difficulty) for window-based applications. Screen scraping can be used purely to obtain information from the current screen, but typically there will be techniques to drive the application, for example emulating key presses or muse clicks. This can be use to crawl the application and extract data, or to allow the creation of an alternative (more up-to-date) user interface. When screen scraping is applied to web pages it is called web scrapping.
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