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Get a table from a website in json format

in Getting Started • 3 years ago

Hello, I am completely new to javascript/jquery, so I have this simple question:

How would you best approach extracting a table from, say, a wikipedia article? I did it manually through my browser's console by selecting the wanted html table elements and looping through them, but I would like to automate this process (as in - have a script that takes the input link and saves the json output for the desired table on my disk). Is using the Wikipedia API the only way? I found it rather perplexing and complicated for the simple reason that I need it.

Replies(3)

jakecigar

Re: Get a table from a website in json format

3 years ago

Is using the Wikipedia API the only way?

Yes,

Don’t "scrape" their site. Don’t do it manually.

API:Main page - MediaWiki has lots of examples how to do it "legally".

JΛ̊KE

EmailsGma..

Re: Re: Get a table from a website in json format

3 years ago

Sorry, I need more help. Some guiding direction.

Say, I want to get 2 parameters from this table - Country and Rank in a json with an ajax call.

I dabbled with the wikipedia API, but I couldn't figure out at all how to get something comprehensible out of it. The best I got was an incomprehensible mess such as this. I wouldn't know where to begin to extract any data from that.

watusiware

Re: Get a table from a website in json format

3 years ago

Your question has nothing to do with jQuery. You will have better luck asking in some forum for users of Wikipedia API.

It will help to understand the structure of the data to run it through a JSON pretty-printer. You can try this one:

http://jsonprettyprint.com/json-pretty-printer.php

But there are many others.

A quick look shows me that the content is delivered as a single string of WikiText. You will need to understand WikiText. That is, there is a string of WikiText inside the JSON. For this particular result, if the response were in an object called data, the Wikitext can be found at:

data.pages['69058']['*']

If you don't know the page ID in advance, you could use $.each to step through the pages. (Of which there is only one!)

$.each(data.pages, function() {

var page = this['*'];

// Now do something with the Wikitext in the page variable

}

Perhaps there are alternative ways to get the text. Perhaps you need to learn how to parse Wikitext. Study the API further, or find a place that discusses the Wikipedia API for help.

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Get a table from a website in json format

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