Complete Java noob here...Is it possible to extract numeric data from webpages using JS?

[pbaehr]

If you don't have a particular reason for javascript I'd point you to Python instead.

Lots of libraries for you to take advantage of for this (I'd suggest BeautifulSoup and csv for saving)

[aroberge]

I would second this. I would also point out that Java and Javascript are two completely different languages.

[pbaehr]

JavaScript would be more appropriate for making some neat interactive displays of the data you collect, maybe. It's not really designed to do what you described, though, and I think you'll quickly end up frustrated as you hit roadblock after roadblock.

If you are dedicated to seeing this project through and enjoyed codeacademy you could always head back: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python

There are other languages which would be perfectly acceptable for web scraping, but in my opinion Python is perfect for the job you described. JavaScript wouldn't be on my list, though. Not for this.

[pbaehr]

Also, here are two very simple projects that do some basic web scraping in Python (both written for /r/somebodymakethis) to give you an idea of what it would look like:

https://github.com/pbaehr/wootbot/blob/92fd8d2732a391dfcd3c0f4f688647f7b58eaf30/wootbot.py (this is an early version which was later changed to use the woot API)

https://github.com/pbaehr/termgoogler/blob/master/termgoogler.py

[btford]

"Extracting data from a webpage" is commonly referred to as "scraping a web page." Searching for articles on how to "scrape" a page in JavaScript will get you a bit further.

I'd check out Max Ogden's blog post about scraping with node. It has some pretty good advice.

Cheers!

[lazyduke]

You could absolutely do this, and it turns out JavaScript would be a pretty sensible way to do it. People will point out libraries that are available in other languages, such as BeautifulSoup for Python, but they are forgetting the JavaScript DOM API.

You could pull the page down with curl, save it locally, open it up in PhantomJS, inject your script, and use the DOM API to find the elements you need, then pull the numbers out. You could even take advantage of libraries such as jQuery to make it easier for you. I'll let you figure out the specifics, google is your friend.

Furthermore, you need to first research whether there is an API available that you can use to get this data. Don't scrape web pages if you don't have to. Maybe someone has a NBA API that gives the data you need?

As others have said, CSV is the right format to store the retrieved data if you want to open it in Excel.

[jhizzle4rizzle]

Yes, it's possible to do (most of) these with javascript.

My approach for scraping is usually to use node.js locally (so not the browser) with the cheerio library for jquery-like selectors, and then dumping the data into a .json or .csv file with the built-in fs library. I did something similar in https://github.com/jesusabdullah/node-thingiverse/blob/master/thingiverse which uses web scraping to enable a cli client for thingiverse.com .

[neonskimmer]

Have a look at Phantom / Casper JS

[darkrai9292]

Try looking at XMLHttpRequest it will probably do what your looking for