help!! *extra* tricky web page to extract data from...

[seberino]

How extract the visible numerical data from this Microsoft financial
web site?

http://tinyurl.com/yw2w4h

If you simply download the HTML file you'll see the data is *not*
embedded in it but loaded from some other file.

Surely if I can see the data in my browser I can grab it somehow right
in a Python script?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Chris

[Steve Holden]

Paul Rubin wrote:

"Diez B. Roggisch" <de***@nospam.w eb.dewrites:

>Obviously this wouldn't really help, as you can't predict what a
website actually wants which events, in possibly which
order. Especially if the site does not _want_ to be scrapable- think
of a simple "click on the images in the order of the numbers shown on
them" captcha.

Sure, but most sites don't go to such lengths, and even captchas can
be defeated if you're trying to scrape a specific site and are willing
to spend effort on the particular captcha generator that it uses.
Plus there is always www.captchasolver.com (!).

I especially like the rems and conditions they ask you to acknowledge if
you want to sign up as a worker:

http://www.captchasolver.com/join/worker#

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden [phone] [phone]
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden
Blog of Note: http://holdenweb.blogspot.com
See you at PyCon? http://us.pycon.org/TX2007

[Paul Rubin]

Steve Holden <st***@holdenwe b.comwrites:

I especially like the rems and conditions they ask you to acknowledge
if you want to sign up as a worker:
http://www.captchasolver.com/join/worker#

Heh, cute, I guess you have to solve a different type of puzzle to
read them.

I'm surprised anyone is purporting to pay actual money for captcha
solutions. The usual scheme I've herad (dunno if anyone actually does
it) is to feed the captchas you want to solve into a porn site, so
people give you solutions in order to keep viewing porn. You then
funnel the solutions back to the forms you're actually trying to
automate.

I think captchas are proving reasonably effective as a speed bump but
they do get defeated all the time, whether through automatic means or
otherwise.