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There are plenty of legitimate uses for web scraping. For example, say you have a client with a hundred static HTML pages that need to be converted to put into

There are plenty of legitimate uses for web scraping. For example, say you have a client with a hundred static HTML pages that need to be converted to put into a new CMS. You could go and copy the content by hand from each page. Or you could write a script that scrapes the site and pulls the content out automatically. That will probably save you time right off the bat. And if the client realizes that they want another piece of information pulled from each page, you just make a minor tweak to your script and rerun it.

mahmud 14y ago
"Scraping" implies remote, possibly "unauthorized" access. For your example static html files, converting them to some other format might not be scraping as we understand it, plenty of editors and browsers have options to dump the data as some other format. Once you remove the requirement for remote, unauthroized access, then every data transformation process become "scraping".