Read Dates as Strings with Spreadsheet Ruby Gem - ruby

I have been looking for a way to read out an Excel spreadsheet with keeping the dates that are in them being kept as a string. Unfortunately I can't see if this is possible or not, has anyone managed to do this or know how?

You may want to have a look at the Row class of the spreadsheet gem:
http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/Spreadsheet/Row.html
There's a lot that you can get there, but the Row#formatted method is probably what you want:
row = sheet.to_a[row_index] # Get row object
value = row.formatted[column_index]
The formatted method takes all the Excel formatting data for you and gives you an array of Ruby-classed objects

I think you can try row.at(col_index) method..
You can refer to this page

Related

How to store dynamic value and reuse in Webdriver Ruby test

I'm writing a ruby webdriver test that needs to store a dynamic value such as an order ID to use later on in the text. I think I need to extract the value from the string and then store it as a variable to call for future use.
The string looks like this and I just need to extract/store the numeric value.
<span class="receiptNum hidden-xs">Receipt #: 12303430</span>
Any tips or examples on how to extract that value and create a variable for future use would be great!
To extract the text (only numbers) out of the this element, try using the following code:
#numbers = #driver.find_element(:css=>'receiptNum').text.scan(\d+)
Currently I am saving this number in an instance variable which can be used again in the same test as it will flow around with the test object till the test finishes.
Other option include saving it in a temp txt file and reading from it when required.
Note: Fetching data now and using it later is not a good practice, try not to use this very frequently.
Hope it helps!!!

Ruby and Excel Data Extraction

I am learning Ruby and trying to manipulate Excel data.
my goal:
To be able to extract email addresses from an excel file and place them in a text file one per line and add a comma to the end.
my ideas:
i think my answer lies in the use of spreadsheet and File.new.
What I am looking for is direction. I would like to hear any tips or rather hints to accomplish my goal. thanks
Please do not post exact code only looking for direction would like to figure it out myself...
thanks, karen
UPDATE::
So, regex seems to be able to find all matching strings and store them into an array. I´m having some trouble setting that up but should be able to figure it out....but for right now to get started I will extract only the column labeled "E Mail"..... the question I have now is:
`parse_csv = CSV.parse(read_csv, :headers => true)`
The default value for :skip_blanks is set to false.. I need to set it to true but nowhere can I find the correct syntax for doing so... I was assumming something like
`parse_csv = CSV.parse(read_csv, :headers => true :skip_blanks => true)`
But no.....
save your excel file as csv (comma separated value) and work with Ruby's libraries
besides spreadsheet (which can read and write), you can read Excel and other file types with with RemoteTable.
gem install remote_table
and
require 'remote_table'
t = RemoteTable.new('/path/to/file.xlsx', headers: :first_row)
when you write the CSV, as #aug2uag says, you can use ruby's standard library (no gem install required):
require 'csv'
puts [name, email].to_csv
Personally, I'd keep it as simple as possible and use a CSV.
Here is some pseudocode of how that would work:
read in your file line by line
extract your fields using regex, or cell count (depending on how consistent the email address location is), and insert into an arry
iterate through the array and write the values in the fashion you wish (to console, or file)
The code in the comment you had is a great start, however, puts will only write to console, not file. You will also need to figure out how you are going to know you are getting the email address.
Hope this helps.

Extracting text from a webtable in Watir / Ruby

I'm trying to extract the data from an Income Statement, url is http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=LMT+Income+Statement&annual
I was unable to find the table using the browser.table(:name, 'blah') or (:id, 'blah'), but had some luck using the xpath with Nokogiri using this code, which picks up after I've initialized everything and browsed to the page:
page_html = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(browser.html)
tobj = page_html.xpath('//*[#id="yfncsumtab"]').inner_text
Now I'm able to take tobj and pull the data out, but it doesn't do me any good for trying to manipulate the object as a table. Any suggestions on how to go about storing the table as a variable would help. I can probably figure out iterating through the rows/columns from there, but I wouldn't mind if you tacked on some code that would do that.
Do you know Watir has xpath support?
browser.element(:xpath => '//*[#id="yfncsumtab"]')
Look at it this way:
doc = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(browser.html)
table = doc.at('table#yfncsumtab')
# iterate through tr's
table.search('tr').each do |tr|
# do something with tr
end
Try browser.element(id: "yfncsumtab").text

performance issue of watir table object processing. How to make Nokogiri html table into array?

The following works but is always very slow, seemingly halting my scraping program and its Firefox or Chrome browser for even whole minutes per page:
pp recArray = $browser.table(:id,"recordTable").to_a
Getting the HTML table's text or html source is fast though:
htmlcode = $browser.table(:id,"recordTable").html # .text shows only plaintext portion like lynx
How might I be able to create the same recArray (each element from a <TR>) using for example a Nokogiri object holding only that table's html?
recArray = Nokogiri::HTML(htmlcode). ??
I wrote a blog post about that a few days ago: http://zeljkofilipin.com/watir-nokogiri/
If you have further questions, ask.
You want each tr in the table?
Nokogiri::HTML($browser.html).css('table[#id="recordTable"] > tr')
This gives a NodeSet which can be more useful than Array. Of course there's still to_a
Thought it would be useful to sum up all the steps here and there:
The question was how to produce the same array object filled with strings from the page's text content that a Watir::Webdriver Table #to_a might produce, but much faster:
recArray = Nokogiri::HTML(htmlcode). **??**
So instead of this as I was doing before:
recArray=$browser.table(:class, 'detail-table w-Positions').to_a
I send the whole page's html as a string to Nokogiri to let it do the parsing:
recArray=Nokogiri::HTML($browser.html).css('table[#class="detail-table w-Positions"] tr').to_a
Which found me the rows of the table I want and put them into an array.
Not done yet since the elements of that array are still Nokogiri (Table Row?) types, which barfed when I attempted things like .join(",") (useful for writing into a .CSV file or database for instance)
So the following iterates through each row element, turning each into an array of pure Ruby String types, containing only the text content of each table cell stripped of html tags:
recArray= recArray.map {|row| row.css("td").map {|c| c.text}.to_a } # Could of course be merged with above to even longer, nastier one-liner
Each cell had previously also been a Nokogiri Element type, done away with the .text mapping.
Significant speedup achieved.
Next I wonder what it would take to simply override the #to_a method of every Watir::Webdriver Table object globally in my Ruby code files....
(I realize that may not be 100% compatible but it would spare me so much code rewriting. Am willing to try in my personal.lib.rb include file.)

Using Ruby CSV to extract one column

I've been trying to work with getting a single column out of a csv file.
I've gone through the documentation, http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/csv/rdoc/index.html
but still don't really understand how to use it.
If I use CSV.table, the response is incredibly slow compared to CSV.read. I admit the dataset I'm loading is quite large, which is exactly the reason I only want to get a single column from it.
My request is simply currently looks like this
#dataTable = CSV.table('path_to_csv.csv')
and when I debug I get a response of
#<CSV::Table mode:col_or_row row_count:2104 >
The documentation says I should be able to use by_col(), but when I try to output
<%= debug #dataTable.by_col('col_name or index') %>
It gives me "undefined method 'col' error"
Can somebody explain to me how I'm supposed to use CSV? and if there is a way to get columns faster using 'read' instead of 'table'?
I'm using Ruby 1.92, which says that it is using fasterCSV, so I don't need to use the FasterCSV gem.
To pluck a column out of a csv I'd probably do something like the following:
col_data = []
CSV.foreach(FILENAME) {|row| col_data << row[COL_INDEX]}
That should be substantially faster than any operations on CSV.Table
You can get the values from single column of the csv files using the following snippet.
#dataTable = CSV.table('path_to_csv.csv')
#dataTable[:columnname]

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