NachoSoto / tabletojson

An npm module for node.js to convert HTML tables to JSON objects

Table to JSON

Converts HTML tables to JSON. Can be passed an HTML blob or URL.

Can be passed the markup for a single table, a fragment of HTML or an entire page or a URL (with an optional callback function - also supports promises).

The response is always an array. Every array entry in the response represents a table found on the page (in same the order they were found in the HTML).

I wrote this because I've been doing a lot of HTML scraping on hack days recently.

Known issues / limitations

It only supports parsing basic tables with a simple horizontal set of headings and corresponding cells.

It's intended for hackers, you'll need to handle things like work out which tables to parse and (in most cases) to clean up the data. You might want to combine it it with modules like json2csv.

You might want to use it with a module like 'cheerio' if you want to only ever parse specific tables in a blob of HTML.

Example usage

// Convert an HTML blob into an array of all the tables on the page
var tabletojson = require('tabletojson');
var tablesAsJson = tabletojson.convert(html);
var firstTableAsJson = tablesAsJson[0];
var secondTableAsJson = tablesAsJson[1];
...

// Fetch a URL and parse all it's tables into JSON, using a callback
var tabletojson = require('tabletojson');
var url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states';
tabletojson.convertUrl(url, function(tablesAsJson) {
    var listofSovereignStates = tablesAsJson[0];
    ...
});

// Fetch a URL and parse all it's tables into JSON, using promises
var tabletojson = require('tabletojson');
var url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_rating';
tabletojson.convertUrl(url)
.then(function(tablesAsJson) {
    var standardAndPoorRatings = tablesAsJson[0];
    var fitchRatings = tablesAsJson[1];
    ...
});

// Fetch a table from Wikipedia and combine with json2csv to convert to CSV
var tabletojson = require('tabletojson');
var json2csv = require('json2csv');
var url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_rating';
tabletojson.convertUrl(url)
.then(function(tablesAsJson) {
    var standardAndPoorCreditRatings = tablesAsJson[0];
    json2csv({ data: standardAndPoorCreditRatings, fields: [ 'Country', 'Outlook'] }, function(err, csv) {
        console.log(csv);
        /* Example output
            "Country","Outlook"
            "Abu Dhabi, UAE","Stable"
            "Albania","Stable"
            "Andorra","Negative"
            "Angola","Stable"
            "Argentina","Negative"
            "Aruba","Stable"
            "Australia","Stable"
            "Austria","Negative"
            "Azerbaijan","Positive"
            ...
        */
    });
});