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.
Great.
But it could be cool if we could use all these great data extraction tools from SSIS also 🙂
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
Those functions obviously haven’t made their way to Excel yet; I guess they’ll be added in the next few months.
Python.Execute is intersting
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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!
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.
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!
Great, thank you very much Chris 👍
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Very interesting tutorial Chris, I tried to apply this but I’m still struggling to get data from Yahoo Finance – Income Statement Table. I need the Income Statement (Quarterly data) for Apple from this link: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/financials?p=AAPL&.tsrc=fin-srch
Since the page address does not change, I have not managed to extract Quarterly data instead of Annual data which appears in the initial page.
Do you you have a suggestion on how to manipulate the table selector (Annual /Quarterly)?
Regards,
Mark
No, sorry, I’m not good enough with CSS selectors to help here
Ok Chris, the selector I’ve already identified – button.P\\(0px\\)
the issue is how to manipulate to load Quarterly data
‘button.P\\(0px\\)’
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Hi Chris, if I’m trying to get a connection to a report that is intranet based (i.e. internal organizational http website) I’m having issues to connect. Do you have any suggestion on how to get that type of connection?
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