Long shot: if the originators of this data are in a country with reasonable disability laws, you could try the "well you have to make your data accessible" approach, which would then get you data scrapeable in a slightly less "ick" way...

Failing that:

If you can save the swf locally, I'd suggest looking at swfmill. Its swf2xml component will give you a (long) xml file with the source text accessible. This won't work if the text has been turned to outlines, or if the text is dynamically generated at run-time (which sounds like it might be the case).

You could try one of the OCR packages/libraries available on Freshmeat, but I suspect you won't have sufficient resolution in your screenshots for them work effectively (if at all).

The only other thing that springs to mind (which is probably going to be very tedious) would be to manually capture each character as it currently appears as a separate graphic, and use those to then match against your screengrabs. That, of course, is going to be very fragile if pretty much anything in the output changes, but it might be worth a go.

Good luck!

Update:

Having read fizbin's post (and had a brief forehead-slapping moment...) you could also try setting up HTTP::Recorder which looks like it might help with the SSL issue too.

In reply to Re: Pixel scraping flash to extract text by john_oshea
in thread Pixel scraping flash to extract text by water

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