Scraping a list vs individual text

This article discusses the use of Scrape List during recording to copy entire lists of values into your automation.

If you're automating a task that involves copying a list of values, you may find the Scrape List feature in TaskMagic helpful. This feature allows you to quickly extract a list of values from a webpage or application and copy them into your automation. To do this first click Add New Automation¹

Then click Capture Steps¹

Once recording starts navigate to a website you wish to Scrape: List¹ from. For this example we’ll use the TaskMagic search page. Once you’ve click Scrape: List¹ on the bottom left of the Recording Bar you’ll get a selector. You’ve entered ‘select mode’ you should select the first two item in a list, in this case we click on the two first icons¹ on the page. We can also Scrape: Text² like where the arrow is pointing to “this browser window will capture your steps² ”. We’ll talk more about Scrape: Text² in a bit.

Next because I clicked Scrape: List¹ and selected both Notion ¹ and sheets ¹. You’ll see a popup that says text² or URL. I’ll explain a bit more down below. We also see a Scraped data⁴ popup. Here you can see the data you’ve scraped, you can also choose from scraping the list of text² or URL’s³.

The difference between scraping a Text ² and scraping URL³. Besides one redirecting me to a website and one being plain text, is that Text ² is just a simple piece of Text ² you want to copy or paste or just scrape. Scraping a URL³ is so you can get the link of whatever is in the list. for example, instead of scraping a list of usernames you could scrape the link to their profile if its available. we only prompt you if we found a URL³ you could scrape.

Here you will learn how to Scrape text¹ to extract a value to put into your automation. Once your Automation Recording opens, you can find the Scrape Text¹ button on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Click the highlighted Scrape Text button and select text¹ you wish to copy. In this example, we’re going to scrape the ”this browser window will capture your steps² ”.

Once you’ve Scrape Text¹ the green box above, you’ll notice below it registered a click and then the Scrape Text¹ value.

The information you scraped will be stored in the Google Sheet¹ you linked. Because it was one element, it’ll look like this.

As you can see, we can do plenty with Scrape list¹ from scraping names, usernames, prices, etc. all the way to the actual URL² of the page. The Scrape text³ is the tool we’ll use to copy and pase certain items and its also useful for scraping one specific element.

As you can see, we have the Scrape: List Text¹ scraping the actual text of the list names and the Scrape: List URL² is the one in charge of giving us the URL² page. With theScrape text³ tool you can easily select and extract text values to use in your automation.