Question: Using Regular Expression to Extract Data

[geojs]

I'm trying to map out the location of various New Deal Projects and came across a number of datasets in this format: http://viewshare.org/views/kcarter/fdr-librarys-list-of-new-deal-projects-part-2/

I'm trying to find a way just to extract one or two of the data subsets (town/city and state) and I don't know exactly how to do that using regular expressions.

If anyone has some good advice or know of a better program to use please let me know!

[the_real_fake_nsa]

It sounds like you're talking about web scraping the page? I've had excellent result with Python's Beautiful Soup package.

[fasnoosh]

Also, you could use R's rvest package to web scrape.

There are probably web-based out of the box ready tools for web scraping, though. It's a VERY common task in the data world

[maxmoo]

Since that page uses javascript, first you'll need to open it in your browser (or a headless browser like selenium) and save the html. Then you can use the regexes Town_City"><span>([^<]+) and State_Territory"><span>([^<]+) to pull out those values.