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Power Automate doesn't detect pattern when trying to scrape website text over several paragraphs, web helper always only lets me select a single source

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Posted on by oliver9

Hi all, I've been trying to scrape this online textbook from openstax https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction,

I can select the pager element, and I've been trying to extract text from the div and paragraphs individually.
But whenever I move to a new page I have to select a new element.

If I do advanced and change it always changes back to single element whenever I select a new pages divs text.

I know we can download pdf, and epub versions of this, but I would like to have the raw texts though if possible.

What am I doing wrong?

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Power Automate Desktop

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hello,

Your selectors are not Dynamic and instead are static. In short: The selectors you declare on page one, won't work on page 2 or page 10. Same goes the other way around.

You have to look for the selector that is the same on each page. Which is: div[Id="main-content"] AND ONLY div[Id="main-content"]
So your UI element within your scrape activity should have this selector.

Good Luck 🙂

PS: this selector made me scrape multiple pages on the site you want to scrape.

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Reading your topic back, you've maybe already found that you can use div[Id="main-content"]. To get all content on a page.

To get paragraphs on a page, you can use The sections or Para elements on the page. If you inspect the page you can see that sections are made up by sect-xxxx and parapgraphs are made up by para-xxxxx.

It's gonna be a little bit advanced but you can loop thru the xxxx'es in Sections and Paragraphs.

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oliver9 10 on at

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Thanks a lot, I'll try with this, I didn't know about the main content tag. I'm optimistic since it worked for you 🙂

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oliver9 10 on at

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hmm, ok, I am not able to do it.
When I try to extract value it always just says single value is that the issue?
Because it only extracts one time, clicks on next and stops

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oliver9 10 on at

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How do I get to that page on your screenshot where I can select the divs? I only have the advanced settings via the webhelper:

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hello,

If it Extracts one time and it stops, perhaps you don't have any activity after extracting the first page.

You can use a Loop in which you can set the counter to the amount of pages it has and increment it by 1.
Within the loop you can {
1. Extract the page activity.
2. Click on next activity
3. Write the extracted value to an Excel/CSV file. }

In the end you will have a file with all the extracted values.

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ollibolli 2 on at

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Thank you! Are there tutorials? I don't know how to set a loop and I feel bad for keep coming back to ask you.
How do you get to the window in your screenshot above where I can select the different UI elements?

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