How do I retrieve information from an existing web page?

[littlegreenmen]

I'm not sure if I'm in the right place to ask this question, but I hope I am. I'm trying to creating a catalog program for myself. I am envisioning it to be something like netag or pricewatcher. How do I create a search box that will search a listing of websites and pull certain information, then add that to a databse? Thank you for help on such a bizzare question.

[Guest]

Read up on CFHTTP at http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-p58.htm#wp1632966. After execution, the variable CFHTTP.FileContent will contain the entire Web page. You'll have to build a parser to scrape the screen.

A couple of observations.

Plan on it taking several seconds for each Web site your getting. More an issue of Internet speed and remote server responsiveness than any thing else.

Also, it would be a good idea if you have permission from the owners of the sites you plan to tap.