Off Topic (Screen Scraping)

[Robert Vincent]

Greetings All,   Thought I'd throw this one out to members of the R>list and see if anyone has a recommendation.   I need to: - Capture graphic text (from a terminal emulation program) - Convert it to ASCII (using some sort of OCR) - Import it into R:base   Importing is the easy part...  Getting a static rectangle portion of the graphic screen and converting it to ASCII seems to be the hurdle!   I've been told that a technology known as "screen-scraping" was the rage a few years back (a few DOS years back when screen data was not graphical as in today's world).   Ideally, I'd like the user to press a hot-key to activate the capture, conversion and storing of the text. From there, I can trigger an auto-load of the ASCII string into the database.   Anyone ever done or heard of something like this before?!   - Rob Vincent