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#1
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc,microsoft.public.excel.programming,microsoft.public.excel.querydao
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Web Query and Line Break <BR tags
Hi there,
I have a problem that I have seen come up a few times in searching through the archives, but I have not been able to find a solution (if there is one). I have a project that I believe an Excel Web Query would be perfect for, except for one small problem. When I run a Web Query against a website to pull in a table, and in that table one of the cells has multiple lines separated by <BR tags, Excel puts the multiple lines into separate cells. The ideal situation would be for it to use the <td tags as cell delimiters, not the <br tags. Can anyone think of any clever workarounds to this? Thanks! |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc,microsoft.public.excel.programming,microsoft.public.excel.querydao
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Web Query and Line Break <BR tags
"AhBook" wrote...
.... When I run a Web Query against a website to pull in a table, and in that table one of the cells has multiple lines separated by <BR tags, Excel puts the multiple lines into separate cells. The ideal situation would be for it to use the <td tags as cell delimiters, not the <br tags. Can anyone think of any clever workarounds to this? A metaphorical answer. The village idiot (Excel) believes he knows how to perform particular tasks better than anyone else, and being the village idiot is incapable of learning otherwise and is adamantly unwilling to perform those tasks any other way. Your choices are don't use the village idiot to perform these tasks or get used to taking the village idiot's work product and converting into the correct form. One option would be using the unix-like utility wget to download web pages to local disk files, use a text filter (Perl or Python would be the best languages in which to write such a filter) to remove all <BR tags inside HTML tables, then run the web query against the local HTML file, using the file:// directive rather than html://. This is a guess on my part - I've never tried a web query against a local drive. The point here is that if Excel thinks <BR tags should trigger moving down one row, there's nothing in any normal human's power to get Excel to do anything else. Microsoft has the unfortunate habbit of writing software that performs certain tasks 'The One True Way'. This would seem to be one case. |
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