screen scraping
 v.

    The act of capturing data from a system or program by snooping the contents
    of some display that is not actually intended for data transport or
    inspection by programs. Around 1980 this term referred to tricks like
    reading the display memory of a smart terminal through its auxiliary port.
    Nowadays it often refers to parsing the HTML in generated web pages with
    programs designed to mine out particular patterns of content. In either
    guise screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is
    very likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being
    snooped.