Unit 19.2. Reading Other Web Sites
Oracle provides an interesting package that allows PL/SQL to read Web pages like a text-only browser. This package is UTL_HTTP. UTL_HTTP reads HTML into a PL/SQL table or a VARCHAR2 variable. You are then free to analyze the resulting HTML source code.
A natural question is: Why would anyone be interested in analyzing the HTML of someone else’s Web site? There are numerous reasons. You might want to read a document, then, after having analyzed its contents, isolate the data you find most relevant, then load it into your database. You might also wish to read a document from your own site and save the text in the database. This saved text could serve as an audit trail of how the document source code changes over ...
Get Oracle® Web Application Programming for PL/SQL® Developers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
