Question

I’m trying to extract data from the following page:

http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_PanBMDataServlet?param1=&param2=&param3=&param4=&param5=2009-04-22&param6=37#

Which, conveniently and inefficiently enough, includes all the data embedded as a csv file in the header, set as a variable called gs_csv.

How do I extract this? Document.body.innerhtml skips the header where the data is, what is the alternative that includes the header (or better yet, the value associated with gs_csv)?

(Sorry, new to all this, I’ve been searching through loads of documentation, and trying a lot of them, but nothing so far has worked).

---

Thanks to Sinan (this is mostly his solution transcribed into Python).

import win32com.client 

import time 

import os 

import os.path

ie = Dispatch("InternetExplorer.Application") 

ie.Visible=False 

ie.Navigate("http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_PanBMDataServlet?param1=&param2=&param3=&param4=&param5=2009-04-22&param6=37#")

time.sleep(20)

webpage=ie.document.body.innerHTML

s1=ie.document.scripts(1).text 

s1=s1[s1.find("gs_csv")+8:-11]

scriptfilepath="c:\FO Share\bmreports\script.txt" 

scriptfile = open(scriptfilepath, 'wb') 

scriptfile.write(s1.replace('\n','\n')) 

scriptfile.close()

ie.quit

Answer 1

Untested: Did you try looking at what Document.scripts contains?

UPDATE:

For some reason, I am having immense difficulty getting this to work using the Windows Scripting Host (but then, I don’t use it very often, apologies). Anyway, here is the Perl source that works:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;
$Win32::OLE::Warn = 3;

my $ie = get_ie();

$ie->{Visible} = 1;

$ie->Navigate(
    'http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_PanBMDataServlet?'
    .'param1=&param2=&param3=&param4=&param5=2009-04-22&param6=37#'
);

sleep 1 until is_ready( $ie );

my $scripts = $ie->Document->{scripts};

for my $script (in $scripts ) {
    print $script->text;
}

sub is_ready { $_[0]->{ReadyState} == 4 }

sub get_ie {
    Win32::OLE->new('InternetExplorer.Application', 
        sub { $_[0] and $_[0]->Quit },
    );
}

__END__

C:\Temp> ie > output

output now contains everything within the script tags.