Get HTML

This action can be used to scrape web content from an HTML page, by isolating elements given a complex XPATH evaluation string.

The resulting selected value (which is stored as a String), is output to an internally defined variable.

Properties

Input

  • URL: The given URL, or variable defined as the specific URL.

  • Evaluator: variable defined with XPATH evaluation string.

Output

  • Output: set already defined variables as output, or define a new one.

Misc

  • Display Name: action display name in your implementation project

  • Wait Before: number milliseconds robot to wait before executing the action.

  • Wait After: number milliseconds robot to wait until moving to the next action.

  • Abort on Error: True/False

  • Retry Times: Specifies the number of times to retry an action if it doesn't end successfully. Default value 0 (no retry); Use -1 if you want to retry indefinitely.

Use Case

Potential Use Cases

  • Scrape the listings of an online shop, export in excel, and generate statistics based on scraped data.

  • From the Ministry of Finance website, scrape the list of companies that didn’t pay taxes in order to avoid them as suppliers or customers.

  • Scrape the price of some cryptocurrencies over time and determine a trend.

Examples of Using Get HTML

Example

In this example, the robot finds out one of his friends became a parent and it wants to buy a pair of trousers for the baby from this website.

It chooses these trousers and wants to check their price using the Scrape Webpage method.

Watch the robot in action:

You can see how the Get HTML activity is used in an example that incorporates multiple activities. You can check and download the example from here:

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