Creating a program to retrieve data from website. Need a lot of Help
 

I am very new to this forum, and really software development in general. I would like to get any constructive input I can because I need it and it may save me a lot of time and wasted effort.

So several times a day i have to check numbers off of different web pages and compare them. This process takes up so much of my time that i have two choices right now: hire someone to do it for me, or write a program to do it(or pay someone else to.) Because I am cheap and would like to learn a bit more about programming I am going to attempt to do this myself first and see how it goes.

Here is what i need my program to do:

1-Get data from websites
2-Compare the data and make a decision
3-Go back to website and put in input

My background in programming is mainly in the area of computational physics. I know FORTRAN very well, and I know c++ well enough to use it. Once I can get the data from the website I know how to compare it and make a decision. I have most of it written in c++ already. What I don't know is how to write a program to actually access a web site and read the data from it. I would imagine c++ is probably not the best language to attempt this in, but i really don't know what would be better.

So how would you start if you were me? Should i learn a new language? Which one?

I know this will be difficult, but i am willing to put in a good amount of time on this because it may save me a whole lot more.

Look into Python and Beautiful Soup.

{{{sorry, but I changed my mind about my reply}}}

We did something similar in class actually. We used PHP and Javascript for the problem. It depends on what you want it to do. If you want to check values in text boxes or any other user input on the website, you can check it with Javascript in another frame on the page. But there is a bit of a security issue you will have to look into about this.