To automatically grab information from many web pages, what ability of scripting languages lets your program act like a web browser and read the page's content?

The ability of scripting languages that lets a program act like a web browser and read a page's content is their capacity to initiate and handle network communications using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is the standard application-layer protocol for transmitting hypermedia documents, such as HTML, across the web. Scripting languages provide this capability through either built-in functionalities or specialized external libraries and modules. These tools allow a program to construct and send HTTP requests, such as a GET request, to a specified Uniform Resource Locator (URL) on a web server, mimicking the exact action a human-controlled web browser performs to load a page. The web server then processes this request and sends back an HTTP response, which contains the requested web page's raw content, typically in HTML format, along with other data like headers. "Reading the page's content" refers to the program receiving this raw data stream from the server and making it accessible within the program's memory for further processing, such as parsing to extract specific information.