Question

I have a two part problem that needs fixing. I’ll try my best to describe it then break down what I “think” the steps are.

I am trying to get a specific table in a webpage and email it to myself.

At the moment what I am trying is to use GNU\Win32 wget.exe (I’d rather use PowerShell natively but for some reason I couldn’t, perhaps because the method I was using couldn’t render the ASPX page?)
Using wget I was able to make a local html version of the ASPX page.

Now I have been attempting to parse the file and extract a specific table. In this particular case the table begins with <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" width="300px"> and ends with </table> and there are no nested tables.

I’ve thrown some regex at my problem (yes I know regex may not be the tool I need here) but to no avail.

—Ammended
Here is where I am at now…

$content = (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString($url)
$found = $content -cmatch '(?si)<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" width="300px"[^>]*>(.*?)Total Queries</td>(.*?)</tr>(.*?)</table>'
$result = $matches[3]
$result

Answer 1

I’ve done this sort of thing with PowerShell. It is pretty straightforward:

PS> $url = "http://www.windowsitpro.com/news/PaulThurrottsWinInfoNews.aspx"
PS> $content = (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString($url)
PS> $content -match '(?s)<table[^>]+border\s*=\s*"0"\s*.*?>(.*?)</table>'
True
PS> $matches[1]

        <tr>
          <snip>
        </tr>

Just substitute width for border and 300px for 0 for your regex e.g.:

PS> $content -match '(?s)<table[^>]+width\s*=\s*"300px"\s*.*?>(.*?)</table>'

Ih the case of matching multiple tables, you have to switch from -match, which is a boolean operator just looking to find a single match to Select-String which can find all matches e.g.:

PS> $pattern = '(?s)<table[^>]+width\s*=\s*"300px"\s*.*?>(.*?)</table>'    
PS> $content  | Select-String -AllMatches $pattern | 
                Foreach {$_.Matches | $_.Group[1].Value}

Essentially all matches will be in the $_.Matches collection. If you know that the table is always the third one you can access like so:

... | Foreach {$_.Matches[2].Group[1].Value}