The Add Column By Example functionality that appeared in the April 2017 release of Power BI Desktop is, I have to say, very cool: I’ve used it quite a bit in the last few weeks and it really does work well. One thing I noticed while using it is that three new functions have been added to the M language to support this feature:

• Text.BetweenDelimiters() which takes a text value and extracts the part that appears between two given delimiter values
• Text.BeforeDelimiter() which takes a text value and extracts the part that appears before a given delimiter value
• Text.AfterDelimiter() which takes a text value and extracts the part that appears after a given delimiter value

The functions themselves are quite straightforward and the online documentation has some good examples of how to use them. To save you the click here’s an extra example – the expression:

Text.BetweenDelimiters("Hello *world!??", "*", "!")

…returns the text “world”:

As it happens last week I received an email from a reader who wanted to know if it was possible to extract all the links from the href attributes in the source of a web page using M, and I realised that Text.BetweenDelimiters() would be very useful for doing this. I wrote the following M function to demonstrate:

(SourceURL as text, AttributeDelimiter as text) =>
let
	//Get HTML source
    Source = Text.FromBinary(Web.Contents(SourceURL)),
	//Function to find each link
    GetLink = (Counter as number) =>
                    let
                        CurrentLink = 
		Text.BetweenDelimiters(
			Source, 
			"href=" & AttributeDelimiter, 
			AttributeDelimiter,
			Counter
		)
                    in
                        if CurrentLink="" 
		then 
			{} 
		else 
			List.Combine({
				{CurrentLink}, 
				@GetLink(Counter+1)}
			),
	//Call function
    Output = GetLink(0)
in
    Output

A few things to note:

• I’m using a combination of Text.FromBinary() and Web.Contents() to get the HTML source for the web page whose links we’re extracting
• Since HTML allows the use of single and double quotes for attributes, I’ve added a parameter to my function called AttributeDelimiter to allow either to be passed in
• Text.BetweenDelimiters only extracts one piece of text at a time, but you can specify which occurrence of the start delimiter it uses. I therefore used recursion to extract the contents of every href attribute in the HTML: I declare a function called GetLink, and from within that function I can make a recursive call by putting an @ before the function name as in line 22 above. It would probably be better to use List.Generate() instead of recursion here though.

Assuming the query that returns this function is called GetAllLinks

…then it can be called in a new query like so:

GetAllLinks(
	"https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt798303.aspx", 
	""""
)

One other thing to point out is how, in order to pass a double quote character to the function as text, since text has itself to be enclosed in double quotes I need to use four double quotes: “”””

The output of this query is a list containing all of the links from the href attributes on the page that are enclosed in double quotes:

I guess this could be taken even further to create a function that crawls a series of web pages and returns the links in all of them, then uses the Force Directed Graph custom visual or better still NodeXL in Excel to show which pages link to each other. I’ll leave that to someone else to do though…!

You can download a pbix file with all of the examples in this post here.