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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Automator - workflow help

willibook1.42 - Sep 27, 2006 - 3:39 pm

Hi I am wanting to set up a work flow to cut text from a web site (yellow pages) and enter it into an excel doc ready for a mail merge

The fields that i need to get from each business listing and put into the relevant fields within the excel sheet are

Company name
Street Address
Suburb
State
Post Code
Phone Number area code
Phone Number

how do i go about setting this work flow up? is this possible?

Thanks for your help

frozendice - Sep 29, 2006 - 7:09 am

Well, automator has a few functions that take the text and or links off a webpage that you specify, but you would need to have a function that could get you the html source, so you could parse that, hopefully there's some pattern which you could find. If this is possible to do in automator it's going to be a real hacked up version that only works so so. I don't even think that there are automator actions to do things with microsoft products. At least I don't have any actions that I got when I installed the suite.

You're MUCH better off using some scripting language, and writing a parser, to get the information, then write it into a format which you can then import by hand into an excel file. I'll get back to you with what formats are allowed.

frozendice - Sep 29, 2006 - 7:16 am

Ok, I just checked and this could be easier than I thought.

Here's the final rundown:
Write a script, to get the source of the website you want(possibly use curl), parse that source, and write company name, etc to a text file. When you're writing it to a text file, every line in the text file, is a new row in excel. Every , or tab seperates columns. So when you're writing the file, just have it look like this.
company name1, street address, suburb, state, post code, post number area code, phone number
company name2, street address, suburb, state, post code, post number area code, phone number

etc. This should import. The hardest part will be writing a parser. I hope you know perl, python, or c/c++.

willibook1.42 - Oct 1, 2006 - 1:02 pm

Hi,

Thanks for your response - i do not know programing language so can not write the scripts myself.

I have found some automator actions for excel but they are all for simple tasks

if you can assist further with this it would be great

thanks very much

willibook1.42 - Oct 4, 2006 - 1:22 pm

TechSupport - Oct 7, 2006 - 1:25 pm