Screen scraping

Okay kiddo, have you ever used a coloring book? You know how there are outlines of pictures on each page and you color inside those lines to create a pretty picture? Well, imagine if you wanted to get all the colors of that picture without having to color it in yourself.

That's kind of like screen scraping! There are websites that have a lot of information on them, but it's not always easy to get that information. So, what people do is create a program that will "scrape" the website and gather all of the information on it.

It's kind of like coloring outside the lines of the coloring book - the program is gathering information from the website outside of what is shown on the screen. Once the program has all that information, it can be used for lots of things like analyzing the data or creating a new website.

But it's important to remember that not all websites allow screen scraping - just like how some coloring books might have rules about coloring outside the lines! It's always important to ask for permission before scraping a website.