Getting Data From Webpages?

Question

When looking to get data from a web page whats the recommended method if the page does not provide a structured data feed? Am I right in thinking that its just a case of doing an NSURLRequest and then hacking what you need out of the responseData(NSData*)? I am not too concerned about the implementation in Xcode, I am more curious about actually collecting the data, before I start coding a "hunt & peck" through a list of data.

gary

Answer 1

Unless you are in control of what is getting fetched (e.g. you're sending yourself well-formed XML and can parse it appropriately), you're pretty much forced to picking through it "by hand" as you say. What you're doing here is also called "screen scraping".