I use them when there is some data hidden away with an unresponsive team as far as fetting a good api to read the data, and i don't have a lot of time, so i wil

I use them when there is some data hidden away with an unresponsive team as far as fetting a good api to read the data, and i don't have a lot of time, so i will just toss together a quick scraper from however the data is exposed (could be html, could be csv, could be some terrible json or xml format). I will use regexp, but even more crap like line.contains() or .endswith or line.split("nc]")[1] or json.get('whatevs',[{}])[0].get('sub1', {}) etc. Dreadful, but fast enough to let everyone know, there are 58 Java 7 taking prod load within an hour of the meeting where it was assumed there are zero Java 7 apps.