Extracting text from a web page

Question

I want to extract information about livestock from a certain web page, and add these data to a database.
The web page in question allows me to enter an animal's ID number, and then it displays various data about that individual animal. The format of the page is always the same, but the data vary depending on the particular ID/animal.
What I'm hoping for is a way to quickly extract information about the current animal (date of birth, color, breeding status, etc.) from the open page, and add these to my database.
I realize I can "cut and paste", but that is awfully slow for large numbers of data and animals.
Since the data I need are always in the same places on the page, it seems like there must be a way to automate the extraction.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Eric

Answer 1

Here's a very rough, untested way to do it:
(I'm at work and not on a Mac..so..Milage May Vary)
It would be run as script.pl -i input -o output
eg ./script.pl -i myfilea -o myfileb
oh and the input would be a list of valid web page addresses
eg http://www.foo.com
--bEGIN cODE---
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
use LPW::Simple;
getopts("i:o:");
#allows for using -i -o cl options
open(IN,"$opt_i")||die "Cant open input";
open(OUT,">$opt_o")||die "Cant open output";
#opens 2 files
while ($line = <IN>){
#READ IN line by line
@Doc=();
#clear the variable Doc
@Doc=LPW::Simple::get($line);
#open the web page and store all the html into Doc
foreach $docline (@Doc){
#go through every line of text in Doc
if ($docline =~ m/:/){
#does the line have a : on it..if so..
$docline =~ s/ / /;
$docline =~ s/
$docline =~ s///;
$docline =~ s/<\/b>//;
#these 4 lines remove or reformat html formatting
print OUT "$docline\n";
#ok its simplistic, but for now just spits out the line it read to OUT
close (IN);
close (OUT);