web scraping

I was hoping to write a simple program (if that's possible) to open a browser, go to a site, and scrape a piece of information from that site.

For example, I was hoping to open a Safari of Firefox browser, go to nyt.com and scrape the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is on the homepage.

Does anyone know where I could get an example program that does this kind of thing to teach myself the concepts?

Thanks very much,

- Alex

• web scraping by Alex Goor
• Re: web scraping by Rob Dixon
• Re: web scraping by Octavian Rasnita