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Hackers Wanted
July 13, 2005 11:02 AM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

Is there a way to pull values off of an Internet drop down menu and paste them in a document?

I'd like to pull off the names of conference invitees off of the invitation's website, but they are in a drop down menu. I tried "View Source," but no luck. Short of typing them all out, is there an easy way to extract them?
posted by Frank Grimes to computers & internet (11 comments total)
Why is “view source” no luck? That should work.
Unless the dropdown is being generated by a javascript, then your S.O.L., I think.
posted by signal at 11:07 AM on July 13, 2005


I think it is javascript. I can paste the drop down menu (are these called listboxes?) into a Word or Excel document, but still can't extract the values within the drop down menu.
posted by Frank Grimes at 11:10 AM on July 13, 2005


I agree with going to "View Source" and digging them out of there.
posted by rolypolyman at 11:15 AM on July 13, 2005


if you have MS Office installed (and this is on windows XP), you should have the option when you right click on the page to export it to excel. If you do that it will create a cell for each entry in the listbox.
If that does not work, you should be able to save the page locally and then get the source from there.
posted by GrumpyMonkey at 11:23 AM on July 13, 2005


Can you post the URL? Unless they're using an XMLHTTPRequest call in the JavaScript, the information should be in the source somewhere.
posted by yerfatma at 11:28 AM on July 13, 2005


Even if View Source won't work, if you use Mozilla or Firefox you can force it to give you the rendered HTML by selecting text around the dropdown, then right clicking and choosing "View Selection Source"; this works identical to the normal View Source but will grab what is *actually there* instead of the page's original source, in the event of dynamic updating which is probably what's happening.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 11:35 AM on July 13, 2005


I can't paste the URL because it requires a password. I tried saving it locally and right clicking (disabled). I'll have to try Mozilla or Firefox at home.
posted by Frank Grimes at 12:14 PM on July 13, 2005


If you can save it locally, then opening it up in any text editor (note pad or word pad on Windows, for example) will bypass the right-click thing. View > View Source will also bypass that, no matter what the browser.
posted by TheDonF at 12:48 PM on July 13, 2005


Maybe you could do a screen capture and use a pic to text tool?
posted by glibhamdreck at 1:11 PM on July 13, 2005


You should be able to do it using Snagit. Unfortunately, it is not freeware.
posted by RMALCOLM at 1:39 PM on July 13, 2005


Copy this into a text editor:

<html>
<body>
<a href="javascript:var sl=document.getElementsByTagName('select');if(sl.length){var str='<html><body>';for(var ii=0;ii<sl.length;ii++){for(var jj=0;jj<sl[ii].options.length;jj++){str+=sl[ii].options[jj].innerHTML+'<br />'}str+='<br /><br />'}str+='</body></html>';var ww=window.open(',');ww.document.write(str);ww.document.close()}">Get Selection Texts</a>
</body>
</html>

and save it with an .html extension. Open the new page in your browser, right-click the link and bookmark it. Navigate to the page with the drop-downs, wait until the page is fully loaded, and run the bookmarklet. It'll pop a window with the attendee names that you can copy and paste.

(sorry for the rigamarole with the text editor, Mefi won't let me post a bookmarklet directly)
posted by nikzhowz at 2:46 PM on July 13, 2005


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