Web Scraping

Hey team, first post here so hope you don't mind.

So basically, in short, I am looking to scrape data from a website. The website is racingpost.com and the section of data that I will need to scrape will be their results page; racingpost.com/results.

The results pages change every day with new racecourses so no two days would ever be the same. The data I am specifically looking for is the individual races under the racecourse header. These open up in a separate pop-up window and provide you a break down of all the runners in that race, margins of defeat, jockeys etc - this is the crux of the information I need.

What I am looking to do is getting the information from this pop-up results page into my excel spreadsheet, so I can use the data in my own way for my personal analysis.

Now the bit I am struggling to get my head around despite watching numerous webscraping videos on Youtube is, how on earth can I send a message to excel and tell it to access the website, go to the results page and then click each individual race and scrape the data from the page.

If I'm not making sense then please let me know but I would really appreciate some help on this one!

Cheers

Sorry I'm not very knowledgeable on this subject, but I imagine there would be many ways to do it.

It sounds like you'd be using the same workbook and wanting to refresh/ create new worksheets. Probably with a button which would activate a procedure/ subroutine (VBA).

Or another way possibly would be to use a web browser plugin, just save the data as a csv file or something like that, then import into excel and run a procedure/ subroutine to tidy up the data a little more to how you want it.

I was going to look into this a couple of months back for something I wanted to do but as mine were from pdf files the tables seemed to be a bit of a pig when copying and pasting into excel in it's most simplistic form. Dependent on which pdf reader I used i got different results when pasting to excel. I thought to myself if I'm running into these most basic importing problems with the data in it's most simplistic form I'm likely to encounter hell. So I left it as it didn't really warrant the effort in my case.

However yours is 100% required and I'm looking forward to see what happens!