What Is Screen Scraping?
Screen scraping is what a developer might do to get access to information that's usually only shared via a webpage. The idea of scraping the screen, meaning, programmatically taking what the user would normally see on the screen so that the developer can get access to the data outside of the "application" (web page/web app) in which it's presented.
The screen scraper uses code to access a webpage just the same way that a user would. The code pretends to be the user in a browser, intercepts the stream of bits, and instead of displaying them in a browser analyzes them to get at the desired information on the page.