PageScrape is a command line utility, which can be used to Screen Scrape specified data from a given target Web Page. As an example consider retrieving the current stock price for your company from your favorite stock quote web page, or Screen Scraping the current temperature in Deli from one of the many weather web pages. PageScrape can be easily invoked from other applications and scripts to further automate data gathering.

In order to let PageScrape to know how to scrape the required data the user provides the following parameters - target URL (along with optional HTTP GET request parameters) and a Regular Expression. A Regular Expression is just a powerful and fairly standard way to express a set of textual search criteria, the provided Regular Expression is used by PageScrape to search the resulting HTML stream for the required data.

PageScrape connects to the Web server and submits a GET request, it waits to receive the resulting Web page (HTML text stream), and as it arrives PageScrape it searches using the provided Regular Expression, if a match occurs the matched data is output and the page download is stopped as the Web Screen Scrape is complete.