This robot demonstrates how to work with HTML tables. ## The example HTML table We use the table at https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp as an example: ```html

Company	Contact	Country
Alfreds Futterkiste	Maria Anders	Germany
Centro comercial Moctezuma	Francisco Chang	Mexico
Ernst Handel	Roland Mendel	Austria
Island Trading	Helen Bennett	UK
Laughing Bacchus Winecellars	Yoshi Tannamuri	Canada
Magazzini Alimentari Riuniti	Giovanni Rovelli	Italy

``` ## The HTML parser library: Beautiful Soup The robot uses the `beautifulsoup4` and the `rpaframework` dependencies in the `conda.yaml` configuration file: ```yaml channels: - conda-forge dependencies: - python=3.7.5 - beautifulsoup4=4.11.1 - pip=20.1 - pip: - rpaframework==14.0.0 ``` > [Beautiful Soup](https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work. > [RPA.Tables](https://robocorp.com/docs/libraries/rpa-framework/rpa-tables) is great for manipulating, sorting, and filtering tabular data. Common use-cases are reading and writing CSV files, inspecting files in directories, or running tasks using existing Excel data. ## The HTML table custom parser library The robot includes a custom HTML parser that uses Beautiful Soup internally. Beautiful Soup is mighty and flexible. Building your customized parsers does not take too long! > HTML tables come in many shapes and forms. This example uses a well-formatted and straightforward table. More complex tables might require more effort to parse. Still, the idea is the same: Read and parse the HTML. Return a generic data structure that is easy to work with. `html_tables.py`: ```py from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from RPA.Tables import Table def read_table_from_html(html_table: str) -> Table: """Parses and returns the given HTML table as a Table structure. :param html_table: Table HTML markup. """ table_rows = [] soup = BeautifulSoup(html_table, "html.parser") for table_row in soup.select('tr'): cells = table_row.find_all('td') if len(cells) > 0: cell_values = [] for cell in cells: cell_values.append(cell.text.strip()) table_rows.append(cell_values) return Table(table_rows) ``` ## The robot ```robot *** Settings *** Documentation Working with HTML tables. Library html_tables.py Library RPA.Browser.Selenium Library RPA.Tables Task Teardown Close All Browsers *** Tasks *** Read HTML table as Table ${html_table}= Get HTML table ${table}= Read Table From Html ${html_table} ${dimensions}= Get Table Dimensions ${table} ${first_row}= Get Table Row ${table} ${0} ${first_cell}= RPA.Tables.Get Table Cell ${table} ${0} ${0} FOR ${row} IN @{table} Log To Console ${row} END *** Keywords *** Get HTML table Open Available Browser ... https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp ... headless=True ${html_table}= Get Element Attribute css:table#customers outerHTML RETURN ${html_table} ``` The `Get HTML table` keyword returns the example HTML table markup from https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp. The `Read Table From Html` is provided by the `html_tables.py` library. It parses and returns the given HTML table as a `Table` structure. The returned data structure can be worked with all the keywords in the [RPA.Tables](https://robocorp.com/docs/libraries/rpa-framework/rpa-tables) library.