Question

i have a short script where i’m trying to grab data from a URL and write it to a sheet of an existing spreadsheet. the script is as follows:

function urlDataImport() {
  var input = "https://reports.acc-q-data.com/clientreports/ecaldwell_201206192722/ecaldwell_20122722.txt";
  // The code below gets the HTML code.
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(input);
  var data = response.getContentText();
  Logger.log(data);
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  var ptSheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName("pt");
  ptSheet.getActiveRange().setValues(data);
}

the information in data is tab delimited and shows up properly in the log but because it’s a string i can’t use .setValues to write it to the sheet pt and i’m not sure how to get the information from the URL in any other way.

i’m sorry for the rudimentary nature of this question but i’m very new to scripting so any help would be appreciated.

Updated Code:

function ptDataImport() { 
  var input = "https://reports.acc-q-data.com/clientreports/ecaldwell_201206192722/ecaldwell_2012062.txt";  
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(input);  // Get the data from the URL as an object.
  var data = response.getContentText();  // Convet the object to text
  var dataSheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName("pt");  // Get the sheet to write the data to  
  var rows = data.split('\n');  // Splits the text into rows
  dataSheet.clear();
  var dataSet = new Array();
  for ( var i in rows){
    dataSet[i] = rows[i].split('\t'); // Split the rows into individual fields and add them to the 2d array
  }
  dataSet.pop(); // Had a blank row at the bottom that was giving me an error when trying to set the range - need to make this conditional somehow
  var numColumns = dataSet[0].length;
  var numRows = dataSet.length;
  var lastRow = dataSet[(numRows -1)];
  dataSheet.getRange(1,1,numRows,numColumns).setValues(dataSet);  // Get a range the size of the data and set the values
}

Answer 1

@Serge, I think Evan’s question was different. Evan is concerned that the split does not take rows into consideration.

The solution to that is to use two splits. First,

var rows = data.split('\n'); 

And then

for ( var i in rows){
  tmp = rows[i].split('\t'); // Use Serge's method if this doesn't work
  /* Get the range here */
  range.setValues([tmp]); 
}