The xpath-query, looks for span elements with a class name “byline-author”, and then returns the value of that element, which is the name of our author.Ĭopy this formula into the cell B1, next to our final output for the New York Times example is as follows: Basic web scraping example using importXML in Google Sheets Web Scraper example with multi-author articles We’re going to use the IMPORTXML function in Google Sheets, with a second argument (called “xpath-query”) that accesses the specific HTML element above.
#CHROME WEBSCRAPER CODE#
In the new developer console window, there is one line of HTML code that we’re interested in, and it’s the highlighted one: This brings up the developer inspection window where we can inspect the HTML element for the byline: New York Times element in developer console Hover over the author’s byline and right-click to bring up the menu and click "Inspect Element" as shown in the following screenshot: New York Times inspect element selection But first we need to see how the New York Times labels the author on the webpage, so we can then create a formula to use going forward. Note – I know what you’re thinking, wasn’t this supposed to be automated?!? Yes, and it is. Navigate to the website, in this example the New York Times: New York Times screenshot Let’s take a random New York Times article and copy the URL into our spreadsheet, in cell A1: Example New York Times URL Grab the solution file for this tutorial:įor the purposes of this post, I’m going to demonstrate the technique using posts from the New York Times.
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