Getting data off a website

[jclu]

Hi, I want to write a macro to retreive information from a website and store the information in certain cells in the sheet. I've never done this before, and was wondering if it's possible to get the data from a site? I've retrieved data from websites in Java apps, and so I know that the data I'll get will be the HTML for that page. That's not the issue, as I can easily write parsing logic to pull the exact information I need. But is there a way in Excel to connect to an HTTP address, and retrieve the HTML for a particular page, and store that HTML in preferrably a String?

Also, if this is possible, and for those of you who have done this before, do you know if I have to do any extra steps if the page I'm retrieving is not static, but generated from a Python script server side? To show you what I'm talking about, the page I want to connect to is the results page of a DC project I'm apart of: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=userpage&username=Hiran. As you can see or probably figure out, the process in a web browser involves going to a page where I enter in a form the username, and click search, and the browser sends the username to the server, which in turn generates the page. I don't imagine I would need to emulate all these steps, as although the page is dynamically created, the url for the page is always the same (see above). What do you guys think?

Thanks for the help.

 

[DanG]

Try opening excel and....

Data > Import External Data > New Web Query
And from there follow the wizard.

Then after you get it all setup you can just click on the "refresh" button in excel and all your data will be updated.

HTH.

 

[DanG]

Hey your welcome!
Glad I could help, stop by again sometime.