from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
screen scraping
v.
The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the
contents of some display that is not actually intended for data
transport or inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to
tricks like reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its
auxiliary port. Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in
generated web pages with programs designed to mine out particular
patterns of content. In either guise screen-scraping is an ugly,
ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very likely to break on even
minor changes to the format of the data being snooped.