Google Apps Hacks

72 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

HaCK 27:



Screenscrape bits and pieces from any web page for automated

inclusion in your spreadsheets.

Google Spreadsheets offers you a set of default functions to look up nancial data, or trivia from

their Q&A database . But you can go beyond this feature and access custom data from any

web page, such as a list of links from a blog, or a list of titles or ISBN numbers from a bookseller’s

web site.

There are four key functions that can import external web data: importXml, importData, importHtml,

and googleReader. The most exible of these is importXml, as it turns any kind of HTML into

structured data.

Suppose that you want to automatically add a list of book titles on the subject of extreme sports.

Head over to a bookseller’s web site, like Barnes & Noble (http://barnesandnoble.com) and perform

a search for “extreme sports”; copy the address of the results page, shown in Figure 3-24. This URL

might look like the following:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=extreme+sports

Now you hold the rst part to successfully use the importXML function: the URL of the source page.

The second part of the equation is to tell your spreadsheet specically which HTML part of that

page you want, by using XPath, a language for specifying subsets of an XML (or XHTML) document.

Open the HTML source of the Barnes & Noble page ...