Extreme Web Access: What to Do When FILENAME URL Is Not Enough

Overview

This paper shows how to write an automated Web browser in SAS. One reason a person might want to do this is to extract data from useful websites, so he or she can load it into a data warehouse. SAS provides the URL access method to read HTML from web pages, but this paper shows why it won't work for many websites. Instead, SOCKET access method is used to perform the basic functions of a web browser. This paper explains how a web browser works by learning about HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) - the standard technique for sending HTML over the internet.