Web scraping is the automated collection of data from websites using an interface designed for human, rather than computer, interaction. It is typically used as a way of extracting unstructured data and importing it into a database for later use. Examples could be reading price or share value information directly from a website or posting queries to an online service and reading the results into an app. Steps are often taken to prevent the scraping of data by machines, so sometimes the most basic approach of copying and pasting by hand as the only solution.
