Generating Tables From Unstructured Data

You can also generate tables from unstructured data and store the information in DataTable variables, by using the Screen Scraping Wizard. Variables can then be used further in your automation projects to populate your database, an Excel sheet or many others.

Note: It is recommended to run your web automations on Internet Explorer 11 and above, Mozilla Firefox 50 or above, or the latest version of Google Chrome.

To create your table from unstructured data you can use the following whitespace characters as column and line separators:

• space
• tab

• newline

  Please note that you can use more than one option for each type of separator.

In addition, you can:

• automatically detect column types;
• use the first row as column headers;
• ignore the first column;
• use predefined columns (if they exist).

In the Designer panel, the result of the screen scraping contains the following, in sequential order:

• a Screen Scraping sequence
• an Attach Window or Attach Browser activity
• a Generate Table container
• a Get Full Text, Get Visible Text or Get OCR Text activity, depending on the method used to scrape the unstructured data

• the Generate Data Table activity for storing the data must be added from the Activities panel.

  The following screenshot is an example:

  
  

  

  
  

To take advantage of this feature, do the following:

1. Open the Screen Scraping Wizard.

2. Point to the information you want to extract, such as a web page or a PDF. A preview of the scraped information is displayed in the wizard.

   
   

   

   
   
3. Click Copy to Clipboard and then Finish. The data is copied to the clipboard and the auto-generated automation project is displayed in the Designer panel.
4. In the Activities panel, search for Generate Data Table activity, drag-and-drop it in the workflow, under the Get Full Text activity.

5. Click on Generate Data Table inside the activity. The Generate Data Table Wizard is displayed, where you can actually start tweaking your soon to be table.

   
   

   

   
   
6. Select the column and newline separators you want and tweak the rest of the parameters to your liking.
7. Click Preview. The Test Preview section is updated, displaying how your data could be arranged.
8. Perform steps 4 and 5 until you get the desired outcome.

9. Click OK. The automation project is displayed in the Designer panel.