Using Html.Table() To Extract URLs From A Web Page In Power BI/Power Query M

Last year I blogged about how to use the Text.BetweenDelimiters() function to extract all the links from the href attributes in the source of a web page. The code was reasonably simple but there’s now an even easier way to solve the same problem using the new Html.Table() function. This function doesn’t seem to be documented online yet, but the built-in documentation for the function available in the Query Editor is up-to-date:

Miguel Escobar also has a great post showing how to use it and the new Web.BrowserContents function here.

Here’s an example M query that extracts all the links that start with the letters “http” from my company homepage:

let
    Source = 
	 Web.BrowserContents("https://www.crossjoin.co.uk/"),
    Links = 
	 Html.Table(
	  Source, 
	  {{
	   "Link", 
	   "a[href^=""http""]", 
	   each [Attributes][href]}})
in
    Links

To explain what’s going on here:

Web.BrowserContents returns the text of the html DOM for the web page
In the second step Html.Table takes that text and searches for all <a> elements whose href attribute starts with the letters “http”. I found this CSS selector here.

12 responses

Claus Kirkegaard says:

August 30, 2018 at 2:12 pm

Great.
But it could be cool if we could use all these great data extraction tools from SSIS also 🙂

Charley Kyd says:

August 30, 2018 at 2:54 pm

Chris,

This apparently doesn’t work the current version of Excel 365. Data, Get & Transform Data doesn’t recognize either of these functions:
…Web.BrowserContents
…Html.Table

Charley

- Chris Webb says:
  
  August 30, 2018 at 8:12 pm
  
  Those functions obviously haven’t made their way to Excel yet; I guess they’ll be added in the next few months.
  
畅心 says:

August 31, 2018 at 11:17 am

Python.Execute is intersting

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Diogo Gonnelli says:

November 21, 2018 at 5:14 pm

Hi Chris. Great Tutorial!
I have a issue with the refresh when I use Power BI online with the Web.BrowserContents. I see this error message:
Query contains unknown funtion name: Web.BrowserContents.
Query contains unknown funtion name: Html.Table.
Do you have any idea to fix it?
Thanks!

- Chris Webb says:
  
  November 21, 2018 at 5:25 pm
  
  Are you trying to use this in Excel or an old version of Power BI Desktop? Not all versions of the Power Query engine include this function.
  
  - Diogo Gonnelli says:
    
    November 21, 2018 at 5:32 pm
    
    I’m using the lastest version of Power BI desktop. With the desktop i can refresh te webcontent, however when I publish to Power BI online I can’t refresh. The error message show that the query contains a unknown funcion related to HTML and Web Content. I’ll keep trying. Thanks!
Hoss SATOUR says:

December 11, 2018 at 11:16 pm

Great, thank you very much Chris 👍

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