First post here by the way. If I'm looking to have my site pull a string of numbers from another site and graph the results on a weekly basis, can you suggest what language/technology is easiest to do this in or with?

depends on where from on the other site?

Site scrapping... Perl, should be simple with LWP::UserAgent and or WWW::Mechanize. Plenty of articles online that document the process too!

Site scrapping... Perl, should be simple with LWP::UserAgent and or WWW::Mechanize. Plenty of articles online that document the process too!

Great. Thanks for giving me some leads to go with. Appreciate it. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions once I brief up on the articles.

Another option would be Ruby, hpricot, and Gruff Graphs.

PHP with JpGraph (http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/) is good too, or Artichow (http://www.artichow.org/).

PHP with JpGraph (http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/) is good too, or Artichow (http://www.artichow.org/).

I also recommend PHP. :)

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_scraping

You can use any language out there to accomplish this and many other tasks. It's really about preference and what one's you know best. You can use Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, C, C++, shell scripts (sh, ksh, etc.), and so on.

PYTHON POWER!!!
Very powerful, simple, productive, etc...
you can use matplotlib to make amazing graphs, and several other libs to make web slurping...

As said, most languages do the jobs

It should be easy to do in Perl, with LWP::Simple & HTML::TreeBuilder.

Then again, is the data you want to pull in a table? The Windows version of Excel has a pretty nice feature that let's your grab external web data. From there you can use whatever other features you want (e.g., pivot tables, charts, etc.).

-Bill

I often develop tools that use server side Java to pull data [including xml] from other sites. It is fast, however you must have a web host that supports server side Java.

Q...

PHP (or a C++ cgi) using the CURL library will turn any web page into a file you can parse and do whatever with.

PHP has some built in graphing functions as well.

That said, you can use just about any language to do this. If your roots are C/C++ PHP is probably easiest, but thats just an opinion which is worth the paper its written on ;)

I also recommend PHP. :)

I also recommend PHP. :)

I also recommend PHP. :)

I also recommend Perl. :)

Or PHP

Or a dozen other languages.