Obstacles to Effective Data Collection and Data Extraction

• Getting Started

Many people still use the copy-paste technique to obtain data from web pages. Others hope that the RSS feed of the website that they regularly extract data from will always stay alive. These procedures are actually quite expensive and not economically viable for the long run as they result in much wasted time.

Modern websites lack a structured method of supplying data and commonly use very complicated scripts such as PHP, Perl and Ajax that make the extraction of text all the more difficult. These kinds of issues can be overcome with software capable of reading a wide range of web scripts.