I am new to web programming so this might seem a little strange but does anyone know a way to code a command to go to another website search for specific text and break apart that text into variables to be used in the main page?

For example:

Have the program go to a site like http://www.comics.com/comics/committed/index.html

search for "/archive/images/committed" in the source code

Copy the next 13 characters into Variable A

and

concatonate "http://www.comics.com/comics/committed/archive/images/committed" & Variable A & ".gif"

Thanks!

I don't know but I found there TOS pretty quickly.
http://www.comics.com/uminfo/um_termsofuse.html

Yes, but their TOS are the usual collection of lawyer-nonsense. If you read them literally, they mean you may not access the website. Since the owners of the website have in fact placed it on an http server, such that when your browser requests them to send you a document, the server complies, this implies they either don't understand the TOS themselves, or are happy to collude with you in breaking them.

I don't know exactly what the OP wants to do, but I do not think there is any computationally coherent interpretation of such lawyer-nonsense that means that a program may only send an http request to the server if it is a certain ill-defined category of program that the peanut-brained lawyers thought they meant to be OK, and not any other category of program.

Of course, Legal Mind, in its supreme ignorance, has a lot of power, and this is not "legal advice" (whateverthatisexactly), so you better be careful. Nonetheless, I think it's appropriate to have pretty total contempt for people who attempt to write about something they are totally ignorant of - i.e. lawyers who write these TOS things.

The technical answer to the question is that of course it is simple to read the text of a web page - otherwise a browser would not work - and there is no legal permission required to write a browser. Therefore anyone can do it. If you are using php you simply enable the option that allows a remote URL to be opened as a file, and read the page into a string. You can then parse it as required.

There really is no legal permission required to write a browser, nor a search engine for that matter.
Legal ignorance show up from time to time when lawyers start babbling about "authorised search engines". There aren't any, because there is no authority that goes around "authorising" them.