Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook

Capturing table rows from an HTML page

Mining Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is often a feat of identifying and parsing only its structured segments. Not all text in an HTML file may be useful, so we find ourselves only focusing on a specific subset. For instance, HTML tables and lists provide a strong and commonly used structure to extract data whereas a paragraph in an article may be too unstructured and complicated to process.

In this recipe, we will find a table on a web page and gather all rows to be used in the program.

Getting ready

We will be extracting the values from an HTML table, so start by creating an input.html file containing a table as shown in the following figure:

The HTML behind this table is as follows:

$ cat input.html <!DOCTYPE ...