Using Screen Scraper to Extract Pattern from Local CSV file.
Hi,
I Screen-scraper's main focus is scraping the web, however does it work on local CSV files?
I have a badly formatted large invoicing CSV file from a web interface. The is a recognizable pattern, however it varies based on the number of invoices each client was sent on each day.
Is it possible to use screen-scraper to reformat it locally and save as a different CSV file?
Maybe...but why?
I'll defer to the SS developers, but my feeling is that you probably could find a way to get SS to process CSV files. However, you would need to mark-up the CSV files beforehand to make them look like HTML pages. (e.g., change the extensions, add in HTML structure - head, body, etc.) and might also need to serve the HTML/CSVs through a local web server for SS to access them. (Mind you, this is very my non-expert opinion, so YMMV)
That being said, why do you want to use SS for this when there are scripting languages (e.g., Perl) or programming language libraries (e.g., Java's Regex) created expressly for these tasks that will process the CSV files as they are now? FWIW, I'm not trying to shoot you or your idea down, but I think that there are easier ways to do this outside of SS.
I'm with Justin: you could
I'm with Justin: you could scrape it, but you could get better results with less work using Perl, Python, PHP, etc.