Helps you select data in tables the same way you select cells in a spreadsheet.
It's:
| First Name | Last Name | Job Title | Favorite Color | Wars or Trek? | Porn Name | Date of Birth | Dream Vacation City | GPA | Arbitrary Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| James | Matman | Chief Sandwich Eater | Lettuce Green | Trek | Digby Green | January 13, 1979 | Gotham City | 3.1 | RBX-12 |
| The | Tick | Crimefighter Sorta | Blue | Wars | John Smith | July 19, 1968 | Athens | N/A | Edlund, Ben (July 1996). |
| Jokey | Smurf | Giving Exploding Presents | Smurflow | Smurf | Smurflane Smurfmutt | Smurfuary Smurfteenth, 1945 | New Smurf City | 4.Smurf | One |
| Cindy | Beyler | Sales Representative | Red | Wars | Lori Quivey | July 5, 1956 | Paris | 3.4 | 3451 |
| Captain | Cool | Tree Crusher | Blue | Wars | Steve 42nd | December 13, 1982 | Las Vegas | 1.9 | Under the couch |
There are two versions of the script, one that depends on jQuery and the other that doesn't:
The jQuery version supports more browsers, whereas the non-jQuery version adds less code to each page and is easier to distribute as a Chrome extension. The non-jQuery version invokes web standards directly and supports Firefox and Chrome. It works well as a bookmarklet or a user script where, once installed, cross-browser support isn't an issue.
It's also available as a a jQuery plugin.
Bookmark one of these two versions, or drag it to your bookmarks toolbar:
Here is a user script for Greasemonkey or Chrome.
Install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, then install the script.
Chrome supports user scripts out of the box, but recent versions will only allow you to install them from the Chrome Web Store by default.
You can also get the script from Userscripts.org.
Currently this is a minimum product, hopefully it's viable. No work has been done on interaction with colspans or rowspans, or interaction with nested tables.
It doesn't work with PDF documents, but here is a very cool project that does.
In future it might:
CRUD webapps are frequently built for jobs that users previously addressed with spreadsheets. Despite the advantages of webapps, venerable spreadsheets still deliver great features and user experience. Hopefully this script improves integration between web pages and spreadsheets. With it you should be able to scrape or export any table on the web.
There are also a lot of other great tools to integrate spreadsheet features with webapps:
And there is at least one Firefox extension to enhance tables on any web page: TableTools2. And Firefox lets you select tables out of the box, by holding down the control key.
There are also web-based spreadsheets like Google Spreadsheet and SocialCalc.
Hopefully even more data will get shared in the form of tables.