Programmers often need to use information on Web pages as input to other programs. This is done by Web Scraping, writing a program to simulate a person viewing a Web site with a browser. It is often hard to write these programs because it is difficult to determine the Web requests necessary to do the simulation.

The Web Scraping Proxy (WSP) solves this problem by monitoring the flow of information between the browser and the Web site and emitting Perl LWP code fragments that can be used to write the Web Scraping program. A developer would use the WSP by browsing the site once with a browser that accesses the WSP as a proxy server. He then uses the emitted code as a template to build a Perl program that accesses the site.