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