How can I scrape an HTML table to CSV?

screen-scraping
Nathan Long picture Nathan Long · Nov 3, 2008 · Viewed 78.4k times · Source

The Problem

I use a tool at work that lets me do queries and get back HTML tables of info. I do not have any kind of back-end access to it.

A lot of this info would be much more useful if I could put it into a spreadsheet for sorting, averaging, etc. How can I screen-scrape this data to a CSV file?

My First Idea

Since I know jQuery, I thought I might use it to strip out the table formatting onscreen, insert commas and line breaks, and just copy the whole mess into notepad and save as a CSV. Any better ideas?

The Solution

Yes, folks, it really was as easy as copying and pasting. Don't I feel silly.

Specifically, when I pasted into the spreadsheet, I had to select "Paste Special" and choose the format "text." Otherwise it tried to paste everything into a single cell, even if I highlighted the whole spreadsheet.

Answer

mkoeller picture mkoeller · Nov 3, 2008
  • Select the HTML table in your tools's UI and copy it into the clipboard (if that's possible
  • Paste it into Excel.
  • Save as CSV file

However, this is a manual solution not an automated one.

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