Download data from internet explorer to excel spreadsheets

[toh]

Andy, I saw your illustration obout getting labview to login into internet explorer using activeX. That was very impressive.

I have this problem of downloading array of data (in the form of table) from internet to excel spreadsheet. Would you be interested to help me out on this?

Thanks

[AESulzer]

I'm not sure which Andy you are talking to, but these forums are not the best way to address someone individually unless you are replying to a previous post. These forums are, however, a great way to get assistance with any issues you encounter, so if you could post a little more information about exactly what you are trying to do and what your specific question is, then I am sure that we can help you out!

Kind Regards,

Eric Sulzer, Applications Engineer - NIC

[toh]

Eric, thanks for your kind reply to my request.

Due to accounting works, my wife very often has to download big volume of data from her company's intranet system. These data can either be monthly item sales figure, individual labour's clocking hours and overtime or other expenses report and etc... Irregardless of which type, all are to be downloaded and presented in table form in excel spreadsheet. As the process is quite routine and tedious, I am think of helping by automating the process with a 'robot' {programme :)}.  I am not sure if Labview is the software to do this. If yes, how to do it? Could you advise me?

I currently holding Labview version 7.1, which I am using it for instrumentation purposes only, with NI equipment.  

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

In all likelihood the tables in the HTML files are probably generated dynamically.
This data is probably coming from a database.
Do the files end with the *.php or *.asp?

[toh]

It's asp file.

[falkpl]

If you know the format of the html code you can use string match to parse out the data and create it into an array which then can be written to a tab delimited file or using activeX excel object imported directly into an embedded excel instance. The format of a html table is <table *>*</table>, where the first wild card will match the attributes, and the second wildcard will match the table results. 

after you get table data you need to parse it first for each row <tr>*</tr> and then parse each row for <td>DATA</td> then you can typecast the data to the array type.  This parser can be made of simple string match functions ie first match "<table" pass the string after the match to match ">", the string before the match are your attributes and the string after contains the table date plus the <\table> endtag and so on.

Paul

[Khalid]

Phooi,

This can be done.  You can, for instance, use DataSocket passing it the URL, to get the raw HTML text.  Then, parse the HTML to extract the table data.  This part will require the most work.  And obviously would change from web page to web page unless the tables are identical.

Let me know if you have any specific questions.

-Khalid