Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

How do you do this?

There is a website (public domain info) that has data in a format that is useful but not easily obtained using the suplied tools (its a graphical illustration of a location on a map not the lat/lon of the data itself). I saw someone had parsed a section of it & come back with the raw data in more useable format (as in a csv/txt file).

So what is the trick?

class_A

The technique is called "screen scraping" and if you Google for it you'll find quite a few example implimentations. I guess on Unix you could quickly hack together something using curl, grep and some regular expressions.

Here's a specific PHP script which will pass a query to Google and then scrape the results for reformatting.