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Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage

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Christoph Michael Becker wrote:

> Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>> Christoph Michael Becker <cmbecker69@arcor.de> writes:
>>> Denis McMahon wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 18 May 2014 01:18:46 -0700, FAISAL ISMAIL wrote:
>>>>> i am trying to extract html text from a table on the link
>>>>> (http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/AMSR-E%20Gaging%20Reaches/
>>>> Summary3.htm)
>>>>> the data is in rows and columns. all i want is to extract data for
>>>>> some specific country e.g Pakistan.
>>>>>  Kindly help me with the issue.
>>>> By the way, if I was trying to scrape data from a website, I'm not sure
>>>> that javascript would be my first choice language either.
>>> Why not?  Are there better alternatives?
>> As always, it depends, but I've had some success using XSLT (which I
>> think refers to eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations).  Just
>> another option to throw into the pot...
> 
> Indeed, using XSLT might be a good idea, but this *can* also be used
> from an ECMAScript implementation.

True.  However, it appears to me that it is still proprietary. [0]

The explanation for the abbreviation is correct, which is why XSLT is 
probably *not* a good approach here.  XSLT can be used to *transform* *XML*-
based markup to other markup or plain text. [1]  The original markup here is 
neither [2].  It would have to be cleaned-up and converted to XHTML in order 
to apply XSLT to it.  (I am using XSLT with PHP to convert the FAQ’s XML 
documents to HTML.  See sig.)

A possibility is XPath, which also has an ECMAScript binding in W3C DOM 
Level 3 XPath (or, simply put, there is document.evaluate()). [3]  However, 
DOM 3 XPath is not interoperable when the document is an HTML document (not 
in MSHTML, not even in IE 11).  The confusion might have occured because 
XPath is the selector language that XSLT is based on.

Another possibility is document.querySelectorAll(), but not here because CSS 
selectors cannot select based on element content (as for content, they can 
only select based on *attribute* values).

And unless you would want to extract data to the script console, client-side 
the SOP issue needs to be solved.  But, if the OP can ask the author of this 
document (Prof. G. Robert Brakenridge, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO) 
for a suitable Access-Control-Allow-Origin header field, then they could 
also simply ask them for the data or a suitable filter interface.

So the only possibility would be additional server-side code, which would 
beg the questions a) why not use only server-side code in the first place 
and b) is it legal to reuse data from this document without asking 
permission in the first place?  See also [4].

______________
[0] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XSLTProcessor>
[1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116>
[2] 
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffloodobservatory.colorado.edu%2FAMSR-E%2520Gaging%2520Reaches%2FSummary3.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.3+http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2Fservices>

    (Validating against HTML 4.01 Transitional will get you 16 errors.
    If you validate without overriding the DOCTYPE declaration,
    because there is none here the W3C validator will fall back to
    XHTML 1.0 Transitional, which will get you 38128 errors after a long
    time.)

[3] <http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-DOM-Level-3-XPath-20040226/ecma-script-binding.html>
[4] <http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/AMSR-E%20Gaging%20Reaches/>
-- 
PointedEars
FAQ: <http://PointedEars.de/faq> | SVN: <http://PointedEars.de/wsvn/>
Twitter: @PointedEars2 | ES Matrix: <http://PointedEars.de/es-matrix>
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Thread

Data retrieving from html text on a webpage FAISAL ISMAIL <faesal19@gmail.com> - 2014-05-18 01:18 -0700
  Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2014-05-18 15:41 +0000
  Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2014-05-18 17:41 +0200
    Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage FAISAL ISMAIL <faesal19@gmail.com> - 2014-05-18 12:52 -0700
  Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-05-18 23:29 +0200
    Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage John Harris <niam@jghnorth.org.uk.invalid> - 2014-05-19 11:04 +0100
      Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-05-19 13:11 +0200
        Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage John Harris <niam@jghnorth.org.uk.invalid> - 2014-05-20 10:43 +0100
          Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-05-21 14:34 +0200
            Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage John Harris <niam@jghnorth.org.uk.invalid> - 2014-05-22 10:42 +0100
    Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage FAISAL ISMAIL <faesal19@gmail.com> - 2014-05-22 09:07 -0700
  Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2014-05-19 21:44 +0000
    Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Christoph Michael Becker <cmbecker69@arcor.de> - 2014-05-19 23:55 +0200
      Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2014-05-20 00:04 +0200
        Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Christoph Michael Becker <cmbecker69@arcor.de> - 2014-05-20 12:59 +0200
          Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2014-05-20 17:13 +0200
      Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2014-05-20 00:40 +0100
        Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Christoph Michael Becker <cmbecker69@arcor.de> - 2014-05-20 13:17 +0200
          Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-05-21 14:19 +0200
            Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2014-05-21 13:51 +0100
              Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-05-21 17:55 +0200
      Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2014-05-20 10:05 +0000
        Re: Data retrieving from html text on a webpage Christoph Michael Becker <cmbecker69@arcor.de> - 2014-05-20 13:03 +0200

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