Retrieving information with RSS.

Yo';

I'm not very familiar with RSS feeds, but I believe they're programmed with XML. My question;

Is it possible, is there any way to retrieve information from a website that doesn't have an existing RSS feed? Like, let's say... My bank account balance. Would it be possible to route my login information in an automated script, then retrieve my account balance, even though the bank website doesn't have an RSS feed?

Maybe this seems like a stupid question, but that's the only example I can think of.

Thanks in advance.

As long as you're not actually thinking of getting an RSS feed for your bank account, yes

It's called "web scraping". Basically, you have code that downloads the web page (jumping through whatever hoops are necessary to get to it) and parses the HTML for the information you want. For simple work, straight HTML parsers are best, but for complicated or invalid HTML a regular expression might actually be easier*.

* Though that depends how you define "easier". Example regex I wrote to deal with a site's HTML.

Thanks, Requinix.

I'm on my phone, now. I'll check it out, and I appreciate the quick response. You're always the one to help me out. So, double thanks.