T66 - Extract restaurant data from a Website
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| Task Description |
Let's say you are in a restaurant business and you want to regularly find out all the restaurant businesses in your area.
Note: This sample task uses an example of http://www.switchboard.com just for illustrative purposes.
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| Solution |
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Record a new task
- Click on Tools->Web Recorder.
- Specify the website http://www.switchboard.com
- Type in "restaurants" in the Business Name textbox.
- Specify the location for e.g. San Jose, CA
- Click on Search button.
- When the results comes up, click on Next link at the bottom of the page.
- Stop the recording and save the task.
Please follow the below-mentioned steps to edit the task and extract all the restaurant businesses in San Jose. |
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2 |
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Extract all restaurant businesses in your area
- You need to edit the above recorded task in order to extract all the restaurant businesses.
- Select the task and click on 'Edit' to open it in editor.
- Find the action where it says click on 'Next' link.
- Insert a Loop for 10 times around that action.
- Following are the keystroke actions used to copy the data from Internet Explorer page and paste it into the Excel file.
- Copy the entire content of IE page using Ctrl + A and then Ctrl + C.
- Paste the content into a notepad window using Ctrl + V.
- Remove some of the unwanted text from the top and bottom of the notepad window that gets copied. In order to do that we have used the 'Find' feature of notepad and we look for specific word based on the pattern of this particular website.
- After formatting copy the entire text from notepad using Ctrl + A and then Ctrl + C.
- Paste it into the Excel window using Ctrl + V.
- Since the above actions are in a loop, it will keep on clicking on 'Next' link and copy the information to an Excel file.
- At the end of the task you will have an Excel file that will look as shown in Screenshot 2
Note: You can insert the number of times to loop based on the number of your search results. |
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Schedule the task
- Using the schedule property of Automation Anywhere, you can schedule this task to run once a week. That way you are in tune with the latest information pertaining to your business.
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| When you run this task, it extracts information about all the restaurants in your area. |
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| Wow! This program is fantastic. I was given the task to figure out how to get a list of over 1000 contacts off of a website and into Excel. I was trying to write some kind of macro for days through Excel's VB extension and was making no progress. So I went online and found Automation Anywhere, it took me only minutes to write a macro to copy the addresses. I owe Tethys Solutions hours of my life that I was prepared to spend copying and pasting. Thank you so much Tethys" |
- Ben Kinney,
Monterey media
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