How do I work in a scraped data table without saving to Excel?

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1

Hello and thank you for any help. I am scraping a small quantity of data from a website and I need to work on that data but I don’t want to save it to Excel because my process will scrape the data 80 to 100 times and I don’t want the clutter of that many Excel files. Plus once the iteration is over I won’t need the data any more. How do I access and act on the scraped data given this constraint?

Thank you in advance for any help.

2

Hi @mworth123,

Scrapping the same data for 100 times??

Dt= new datatable()

3

You dont need to save the tables you extracted from the web in Excel, your processes can work with the data in memory only as DataTables and those are discarded as the processes ends. Have you started your project yet? How far did you go?

4

@bcorrea - Thank you, I’ve actually gotten quite a bit done. What I am looking for on the website is the phrase “Work In Progress”. It may appear there zero times, once, twice, three or four times, or more, etc. Would the Text Exists activity be better than data scraping? And if so, can it count multiple instances of that phrase appearing? What’s the easiest way of doing this?

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This text is already present when you load the page? Or can it appear when you click a button or trigger some long term action? Text Exists can be used to know how many times if any a term appears, it has a property called Occurrence that shows this info.

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@bcorrea - Thank you, that is correct. I have UI Path enter a ten digit number and hit enter and the text appears if it is there. If not then I skip and go one to the next.

Assuming that Occurrence shows at least one, how do I read it? If there is at least one “Work In Progress” than I would want to then click on the row in the website and do some activity on the site.

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Oh, wait, but do you care if it appears more than once or your condition is met as it finds the word one time or no times?

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@bcorrea - In this case it doesn’t matter as long as at least once. If “Work In Progress” appears at least once I want to click on the row that holds the data and then open the transaction on the website. How do I read that I have at least one and how do I click on the row that has the text?

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Oh ok, thats easier, when you have your Text Exists in your project, it will have a property in output, Exists in the value you insert a variable of Boolean type and after that activity you insert an IF activity and in the condition you insert that same variable.

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@bcorrea - Thank you, I’ve created the Boolean variable BoolTrue and added it to the Output - Exists cell and my If statement looks like this. is this correct?
2019-10-18_151316

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Would work yes, but if BoolTrue is of boolean type and you want to match the value True, you dont even need the " = True", you can just pass the variable on the Condition field.