Ripping online data...

Did I see a twitch at the word 'ripping'? I think I diiiiiiiiiiiidddddd.....

Anyway, I'm putting a book db system together, and would like the user to be able to enter the ISBN number, click return, and have the system return all the relevant book data. Now since I haven't got access to the ISBN db, I'd like to send the ISBN number off to a lookup site like www.isbn.org.uk and then strip the relevant information out of the search results page.

It seems to return the results in a set order, so should be hard to do, and I'm using VBScript.

Can anyone advise if there's a way of running a HTTP request in the background, grabbing the generated result, stripping the info, and displaying it for the user?

Ahh, it actually turns out that there are free ISBN db's for accessing online....I'm looking into exactly how 'free' they are, but that would certainly reduce the workload...

However, from a purely technical point of view I'd still like to know how to do the HTTP request in the background if anyone has any pointers...

Millions of ways it can be done. Search Google first? Various methods here...

http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_http.asp

A couple of other options to think about

use a screen-scraper:
http://www.troywolf.com/articles/php/class_http/

Pull product data from Amazon Web Services:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html...&node=12738641

Amazon is interesting because you can then use their images and cut down on your bandwidth, but they don't have everything in their system.