I don’t suppose anyone has a nice way of taking the official roster in the FIRST system and exporting it? Tried just scraping it but what a mess of formatting.
That depends on what exactly you need out of it. Printing the roster to a PDF is a good way if you just need it as is, but if you want the data to manipulate, it can be more difficult.
I would recommend printing to a PDF, then copying out of the PDF to a text file (I prefer Notepad++, but there are dozens of text editors that can do the job). From there, do a couple of find/replaces:
- find the new line characters and replace them with spaces. This will put everything on a single line.
- find the “accepted” character and replace them with new line characters. This (mostly) puts each individual on their own line.
- find the “declined” character and replace them with new line characters. This will get more on their own line.
From there, you can copy/paste into excel, and run a “Text to Columns” (Under the Data Ribbon), using space as a delimiter. You’ll have a little cleanup left, but overall it shouldn’t be too bad. Certainly better than trying to parse the HTML page!
Edit: Some of the cleanup items you’ll need to do:
- individuals with hyphenated names will probably take two cells for the name. When in text edit, search for "- " and replace with “-” to get around this.
- if a parent phone number isn’t listed, then the “Accepted” gets moved over, you’ll just need to move this back in excel
- You’ll get the header/footer in there as well. Select those cells, delete them, and shift things to the left.
Great Idea. I didn’t think of doing the txt file first. I went right to excel and the text to columns wont do well with all of the data in one column.
Thanks.