Hello,
Automation Anywhere can perform this task very well. Using Automation Anywhere , you can scrape data from any application not just web applications. For web data extraction, Automation Anywhere provides you with a powerful tool, Web Recorder. Web Recorder understands all web controls. If websites change and web controls move, Automation Anywhere will find the correct controls and the task will continue to work. You can use this tool to automate any web tasks like login to websites, search for items, submit forms, update records, automate ERP web front end, extract web data, testing an online application etc.
What you can do is:
1) Click on Web Recorder link or Tools->Web Recorder.
2) Enter the website and perform the activities that you want to automate
3) It will open a new browser for Internet Explorer.
4) If your actions involve extracting tabular data, then use the Extract Table button from the toolbar as displayed below. Most of the websites have their data organized in html tables and this feature makes it extremely easy and quick to extract the tabular data into a CSV or any other application.
5) If your actions involve extracting / copying other data like paragraphs etc. then use the Extract Data button from the toolbar. You can assign the copied text value to a variable from the list let us say $my-variable$.
6) Click on 'Stop Recording’ (Button visible in the Web recorder Bar at the top of the screen) to stop recording your activity.
7) Type your task name and click 'Save' to save the task. If you have purchased version, you can also specify a password to lock the task.
8) When you open the tasks created using Web Recorder in Task Editor (Tools->Task Editor), you will see all the Web Recorder commands related to the controls you worked with while recording for e.g. links, text boxes, drop down menus etc. You can enter other commands like Keystrokes, Mouse Clicks and any other command from the list of commands provided in the Task Editor.
9) A task created using Web Recorder is not restricted to only Web Recorder commands. You can edit your task and insert other actions to perform required action. For e.g. the data that you extracted can be pasted into any application, lets say MS Word or MS Excel.
10) You can use 'Excel’ commands that works tightly with excel to perform routine functions like Go To cell, get cells, run excel macro etc. You can use ‘Excel-Open Spreadsheet’ command to open the excel spreadsheet in which want to entered the data, ‘Excel-Go to Cell’ command to go to the particular cell in the spreadsheet and use the ‘Excel-Set Cells’ feature to insert the data or formula in spreadsheet.
We have attached sample task file (StockData.atmn) for your convenience in attached ExtractStockData.zip file.
Copy it under location, My Documents\Automation Anywhere\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks.
Copy 1.xls under C:\.
Exit from Automation Anywhere (even from system tray), if it is open and copy Variables.dat file under location, My Documents\Automation Anywhere
This task will extract stock data for IBM, MSFT and INTC in 1.xls. Now, you can sort this excel file as per your criteria and can insert them into online trading program's order-entry screens using 'Excel' commands of Automation Anywhere.
Hope that helps.
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