I use web scraping on pages from our own website. I use this script.

http://www.biterscripting.com/helppages/SS_WebPageToText.html

It’s pretty simple to use.

Web scraping is not hacking. Web scraping is just a technique to gather text information from a web page, just like web robots do. Many sites these days provide APIs to access information from their sites.

Regarding the legal issues, it depends on the particular sites ‘Terms & conditions’. Check the ‘Legal Issues’ section of this article :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

If you want to make a career in scraping, do it in a broad way. That is also learn about text processing, text mining. These are all related fields. But you will have to market your skills yourself. Most companies don’t advertise for such skills, even though they may need them.

The best way to get started in scraping is to learn Perl and Regular Expressions. You can do web scraping in PHP, but its like digging a hole with a screwdriver; it can be done, but it will take a hell longer then if you would have used a shovel. Simple scraping in PHP is ok, but for complex things nothing beats Perl. There are loads of libraries in Perl for the same.

Even if after some time your career in scraping does not pan out, you will have learned a whole lot about text processing and regular expressions, which can be invaluable in any software field.

I am listen about the web scraping from my friend but i have some queries please explain this

Is web scraping is a part of hacking or hacking is possible using scraping

Is it legal Procedure ?

What’s the career and future scope in this.