I hired a developer to create a program for me to scrape data from several sites into an Excel spreadsheet. Apparently, he wrote the program in Visual Basic 6 using IE automation. The program is VERY slow. And every time one of the websites makes a minor HTML change, the program needs to be updated.

Upon hearing this, another developer just shook his head and said it should have been writen using Borland Delphi 7, using Internet sockets.

All this is Greek to me.

In simple terms, what program is best at extracting data from websites? What should I be looking for in the development of such a script?

__________________

---