Difference between CSS selectors preview and extracted data

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Posted on by some1

Hello guys,

I got to know PAD recently and started doing some tutorials, while applying to a real case scenario.

The data I'm trying to retrieve are some <li> items within a <ul> with a specific class.

Using live helper I selected the items I need, while also filtering them for specific text.

In the preview the data shows fine, all nicely distributed to the desired columns, but when the flow ends, the datatable/Excel written extracts the all text after the string, not as in the preview. Please see photos attached (it should have stopped at the red line).

It seems that a new line feed is added to each <li> item, but somehow the preview doesn't match with the final result.

These are two regex I tried to use:

(?<=Modelo: ).+

(?<=Modelo: )(.*?)(?=[\n\r])

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Can you share what the web page looks like, with the specific values inspected via the browser developer tools?
Also, can you share a screenshot of your flow? Do you extract the data directly to Excel, or do you do any processing after the extraction?

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some1 2 on at

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Sure, here is the code:
<ul class="css-sfcl1s"> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Particular </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Modelo: Passat </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Mês de Registo: Novembro </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Ano: 2001 </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Cilindrada: 1.900 </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Combustível: Diesel </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Potência: 130 </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Tipo de Caixa: Manual </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Condição: Usado </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Portas: 4-5 </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Lugares: 5 </li> <li class="css-1r0si1e"> Origem: Nacional </li> </ul>

My flow contains two extract data from web page because, if the ad has no photo, the <ul> element is inside the div (0). If it has a photo, it's inside div (1). In case of a missing div, the flow tries to get the next one. There's probably a more elegant way to do this but it now works.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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That is an interesting approach to do this. I've never seen it done like this, where you pull the entire list to each value, but use regex to reduce it to a single value.

It would likely work better if you provided the specic <li> to the CSS selectors in Extract text from web page, but I assume the reason why you did not do that was because the order of those items can be different.

I would thus suggest doing this slightly differently. Use Get details of web page to get the entire page source. Then use Parse text with regular expressions enabled, to pull out the data you need. You will be able to use the same regex, but will need a positive lookbehind of to not include those irrelevant HTML tags. So, for example:
(?<=Modelo: ).*?(?=)

This will require more actions than your current flow:
One Get details of web page action instead of two Extract data from web page
Six Parse text actions
Six Write to Excel worksheet actions, as you will need to write those values one by one.
But at least this will work properly.

To answer your question - I am not sure why it works like this, but it seems to be because you're pulling out the entirety of the list, and not a single item.
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