Hey,

Ok, first of all thanks in advance for any help received here, I've been trawling the internet for a while and not getting anywhere until I stumbled accross this forum.

Firstly, in terms of my programming background, I used MatLab during my Maths degree and many years ago I did a tiny bit of programming using VB, so I'm not completely ignorant to how it works, but for this purpose I might as well be.

What I'm trying to acheive it this: create a program that can scan (other people's) websites for numerical information and use then perform simple comparisons and calculations based on that info.

Put simply, what is going to be the best language/tool/program/voodoo curse to help me acheive this? I've seen sites that do a similar task ending in '.aspx' - is it asp.net that I need?

Any help/guidance would be much appreciated, apologies if I haven't explained this that well.

Many thanks!

Adam.

Getting set up with ASP.NET would probably do the job but you might not need to go that .NET rout.
That would entail downloading about 100mb of .NET framework etc. just to start with.
You may be able to accomplish what you want with straigh asp. (another MS thing)
Here is a tutorial: w3schools.com/asp/default.asp
but that maybe not. The thing there is that asp is more VB oriented.

You could DEFINITELY do it in php or python for which there are forums here.
There is also perl which is an older yet powerful language.

Many thanks for your help. I think I'll have a go at getting my head around Python and seeing if that can help solve my problem - from what I've read it looks suitable for someone just starting to learn programming and it's free which is always an added bonus.

In terms of what I'm trying to acheive, what 'keywords' should I be looking out for or what areas of the language might I need to concentrate on? i.e. OOL etc? Has anyone done anything similar to this in the past and can give me any pointers?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,

Adam.

I think it will do the trick for you. Python is a powerful yet very friendly language.
More discussion on it here would not be of much use to python people, so how about
starting a thread with a title which expresses your question at the Python Forum: gidforums.com/f-52.html