Screen scraping is the act of reading data from a terminal display so that it can be used programatically.  VT data is decorated with escape characters that define its visual representation (font color, style, etc.), and therefore must be extracted from these sequences.   Typically, data is written to the Vt control during a Telnet session, at which time it is available for scraping.  The Vt control can be dynamically created for scraping scenarios in which the visible display is not required.  PowerTCP provides several mechanisms for accessing this data.

A typical example would be to retrieve a report and add its data to a spreadsheet.  As data is retrieved, it can be fed to the Vt control and scraped into the spreadsheet.  Without the VT control, the escape code sequences would have to be manually interpreted, making this a very difficult process.