programming+to+extract+and+manipulate+information+on+the+web

note to wikispaces about this 2-28-13 --- Hi Wikispaces representative,

I have a very general question which you may have a general answer for. I am familiar with computer programming and often write little Java programs that manipulate text and numbers in a console. Recently I've been thinking it would be neat to write some programs that could interact with my wikispaces wiki.

Here's a small example of something I might want to do. I work in a lab, and I store many different reagents in different locations. On my wiki I often describe a physically existing item on a line of text and then also create a link to an existing page for the location of that item. I think it would be neat to create myself a program that could go through my wiki, and then find wherever I had linked an item to a location. Then on the location page I would add the text for that item onto that page so that at that location page I could see all the items that are stored at that location. This would be different than viewing the backlinks of the location page because the backlinks would show webpages that link to that page, but would not show me lines of text on those webpages that linked to that page.

I don't know if I would ever get around to writing such a program, but it would be good to know how. Therefore, my question is this: is there a way to write a computer program to extract and manipulate information on my wiki, and if there is a way, is there a name for this type of programming or a good book on the topic? Perhaps such programming would be about the same as the type of programming for extracting and manipulating information on any other website? Thanks for any information you can provide me!

Best, Kurt

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