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PONeed ideas on retrieving data from a website
 

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    <p>I'm stumped and need some ideas on how to do this or even whether it can be done at all. </p> <p>I have a client who would like to build a website tailored to English-speaking travelers in a specific country (Thailand, in this case). The different modes of transportation (bus &amp; train) have good web sites for providing their respective information. And both are very static in terms of the data they present (the schedules rarely change). Here's one of the sites I would need to get info from: <a href="http://www.railway.co.th/home/srt/timetable/northlinetxt.asp?lenguage=Eng" rel="nofollow">train schedules</a> The client wants to provide users the ability to search for a beginning and end location and determine, using the external website's information, how they can best get there, being provided a route with schedule times for the different modes of chosen transport.</p> <p>Now, in my limited experience, I would think the way to do that would be to retrieve the original schedule info from the external site's server (via API or some other means) and retain the info in a database, which can be queried as needed. Our first thought was to contact the respective authorities to determine how/if this can be done, but this has proven to be problematic due to the language barrier, mainly.</p> <p>My client suggested what is basically "screen scraping", but that sounds like it would be complicated at best, downloading the web page(s) and filtering through the HTML for relevant/necessary data to put into the database. My worry is that the info on these mainly static sites is so static, that the data isn't even kept in a database to build the page and the web page itself is updated (hard-coded) when something changes.</p> <p>I could really use some help and suggestions here. Thanks!</p>
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