web browser text?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
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#1

Good morning all,

Just wanted to seek the knowledge of the script gurus.

Anyone have any ideas how it might be possible to search for and extract a bit of predictable text off of a webpage?

thank you,

#2

Hi,

it depends on the source code of the website.
You can parse most sites with /usr/bin/curl and filter shell commands like grep, awk, sed etc.

For example, this extracts the line which displays the number of registered users here on MacScripter


do shell script "/usr/bin/curl 'http://www.macscripter.net' | awk '/registered users/ {print $6}'"
#3

Oh thank you. This shows a lot of potential.

Now what if the web page I’m trying to parse is in an open browser window?

The want to write a script that grabs a bit of volatile information on an open page then opens a certain folder based on that clipped info.

I guess I want to parse the source for the open window instead of the http site itself. Does that make since?

thank you in advance

dustin

#4

you can get the source of an open document in Safari with

tell application "Safari" to set theSource to source of document 1
#5 
do shell script "curl http://www.google.com/ | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert txt -encoding UTF-8"

It should work.

#6

Thank you. Now that I have the source of an open page any suggestions on how I could parse down that 400 lines of code to get at the one line or really the one number I need. Would or could I use a shell script on a variable in an applescript?

Or can it be done with in the main script?

Thanks you again.

dustin

#7

What is the site. Maybe it get’s it from a source that can be done easily without having to trim text. :cool:

#8

It’s an internal website for my work that handles incoming and outgoing job orders.

#9

Hello

What does the line look like that your really need?

if it was line 400: you could use something like this:
Starting out with Stefan’s example of how to get out the source from Safari:

tell application "Safari" to set theSource to source of document 1
set shellCmd to "set TheText=\"" & quoted form of theSource & "\"; echo $TheText | sed 400p"
set shellResult to do shell script shellCmd
display dialog shellResult

Best Regards

McUsr

#10

I don’t know if the data I want will predictably be at a certain line number but I’ll give it a try. I do know though that it will be embedded in a string such as:

Order Number:
N344426
Order Date:

I’m looking to get that N number out of the captured source and route it.

Thanks for your help.

dustin