Retrieving data from websites?

There’s this website that posts the wholesale gasoline price of the day. For example this is for last Friday: http://oil.gge.gov.gr/?p=1856

What I am mainly interested is the 95 RON price, in the example above 1.280,028.

Is there any way to automatically extract these values to an Excel without having to manually visit the site and copy-paste the value?

The term describing what you want to do is known as scraping. Here’s an article that refers to a FireFox addon that sounds like it does what you want, but I have no personal experience with using it.

Here’s the direct mozilla.org link to the aforementioned FireFox addon, including some user reviews.

Try the U.S. Energy Information Administration site instead.

Specifically, —> http://205.254.135.7/petroleum/data.cfm#prices

Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for :slight_smile:

Duckster, thanks for the link but I am in Greece so the prices in US are irrelevant to me

I’d just like to note that scraping is frowned upon in the web world. If the site doesn’t have a public-facing API in 2012, they don’t want you making use of their data with anything other than a webpage refresh. They might block you if this is the case.

It’s maybe worth noting that Excel can do this directly, at least sometimes. In Excel 2003 this is at Data > Import External Data > New Web Query…; in Excel 2007 it’s Data > From Web. Type in the link and click on the table containing the data you want.

Oh come on, If you are going to scrape data, at least do it the old fashioned way and write a PHP script to do it for you.

PHP described as “the old fashioned way” made my day