I was working on a project in LabVIEW that needed the current outdoor atmosheric pressure in inches as a reference. Instead of installing another pressure sensor, I was lazy and decided to use this vi to pull the current pressure from my local weather stations website. This is called Website Scraping. You can expand this to pull info from other websites if the info is contained in the HTML coding (meaning: if you can "view source" on the website and easily find it in the HTML code, then you can get LabVIEW to search it too).
I found the inspiration for this trick here.
It was easy to setup. All I needed to is a "DataSocket Open" and give it the URL address of the website containing the data. Next I connected a DataSocket Read with a blank string constant for the MODE. The Data from the Read is fed into a Match Pattern and the Keyword is selected as the regular expression. The string from the Match Pattern is converted to a number using a Decimal String to Number conversion and then read with both an indicator and a thermometer on the front panel
Most websites have hidden their data within flash or java scripts which don't record the data within the HTML data so it can't be found using this method. I can imagine this vi could be expanded to pull in lots of atmopherical data from various websites to reduce a persons reliance on circuits.
Thanks to http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/89171CEC879A70A3862572950057ACC6 and http://labviewtest.blogspot.com/ for the ideals.