Flash is a pain. It is flaky on Linux and can not be scraped like HTML because it uses a binary format. HTML5 and Apple’s criticism of Flash are good news for me because they encourage developers to use non-Flash solutions.

The current reality though is that many sites currently use Flash to display content that I need to access. Here are some approaches for scraping Flash that I have tried:

  1. Check for AJAX requests that may carry the data I am after between the flash app and server
  2. Extract text with the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK
  3. Use OCR to extract the text directly

Many flash apps are self contained and do not use AJAX requests to load their data, which means can rely on (1). And I have had poor results with (2) and (3).

Still no silver bullet…