How can I convert an HTML table to CSV?

Question

How do I convert the contents of an HTML table (

) to CSV format? Is there a library or linux program that does this? This is similar to copy tables in Internet Explorer, and pasting them into Excel.

user_1170669 · Answer

Assuming that you've designed an HTML page containing a table, I would recommend this solution. Worked like charm for me:

$(document).ready(() => {
  $("#buttonExport").click(e => {
    // Getting values of current time for generating the file name
    const dateTime = new Date();
    const day      = dateTime.getDate();
    const month    = dateTime.getMonth() + 1;
    const year     = dateTime.getFullYear();
    const hour     = dateTime.getHours();
    const minute   = dateTime.getMinutes();
    const postfix  = `${day}.${month}.${year}_${hour}.${minute}`;

    // Creating a temporary HTML link element (they support setting file names)
    const downloadElement = document.createElement('a');

    // Getting data from our `div` that contains the HTML table
    const dataType  = 'data:application/vnd.ms-excel';
    const tableDiv  = document.getElementById('divData');
    const tableHTML = tableDiv.outerHTML.replace(/ /g, '%20');

    // Setting the download source
    downloadElement.href = `${dataType},${tableHTML}`;

    // Setting the file name
    downloadElement.download = `exported_table_${postfix}.xls`;

    // Trigger the download
    downloadElement.click();

    // Just in case, prevent default behaviour
    e.preventDefault();
  });
});

Courtesy: http://www.kubilayerdogan.net/?p=218

You can edit the file format to .csv here:

downloadElement.download = `exported_table_${postfix}.csv`;

user_10376320 · Answer

Here's the approach I took using only tr and sed:

< table.txt tr -d '
' | 
sed -e 's/]*>/
/g' -e 's/<[^>]*t[dh]>/,/g' -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'

Explanation

tr -d ' ' delete newlines
's/]*>/ /g' convert tr tags into newlines to break data into table rows
's/<[^>]*t[dh]>/,/g' convert closing td/th tags into commas
's/<[^>]*>//g' delete all other html tags

Sample input
(from an Outlook email that attempted to render an HTML table using MsoNormal):

Sample output


,,,,,
,,,,,
ID,Price,,,,
064159Q,121.85,,,,
2420128,10.00,,,,

See Non-greedy regex matching in sed for a discussion of the approach.

user_256317 · Answer

OpenOffice.org can view HTML tables. Simply use the open command on the HTML file, or select and copy the table in your browser and then Paste Special in OpenOffice.org. It will query you for the file type, one of which should be HTML. Select that and voila!

user_684350 · Answer

Here's an updated version of Yuvai's answer, which properly handles fields that require quoting (i.e. fields that contain commas in the data, double quotes, or span multiple lines)

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from html.parser import HTMLParser
import sys
import re

class HTMLTableParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self, row_delim="
", cell_delim=","):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.despace_re = re.compile("\s+")
        self.data_interrupt = False
        self.first_row = True
        self.first_cell = True
        self.in_cell = False
        self.row_delim = row_delim
        self.cell_delim = cell_delim
        self.quote_buffer = False
        self.buffer = None

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        self.data_interrupt = True
        if tag == "table":
            self.first_row = True
            self.first_cell = True
        elif tag == "tr":
            if not self.first_row:
                sys.stdout.write(self.row_delim)
            self.first_row = False
            self.first_cell = True
            self.data_interrupt = False
        elif tag == "td" or tag == "th":
            if not self.first_cell:
                sys.stdout.write(self.cell_delim)
            self.first_cell = False
            self.data_interrupt = False
            self.in_cell = True
        elif tag == "br":
            self.quote_buffer = True
            self.buffer += self.row_delim

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        self.data_interrupt = True
        if tag == "td" or tag == "th":
            self.in_cell = False
        if self.buffer != None:
            # Quote if needed...
            if self.quote_buffer or self.cell_delim in self.buffer or "\"" in self.buffer:
                # Need to quote! First, replace all double-quotes with quad-quotes
                self.buffer = self.buffer.replace("\"", "\"\"")
                self.buffer = "\"{0}\"".format(self.buffer)
            sys.stdout.write(self.buffer)
            self.quote_buffer = False
            self.buffer = None

    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.in_cell:
            #if self.data_interrupt:
            #   sys.stdout.write(" ")
            if self.buffer == None:
                self.buffer = ""
            self.buffer += self.despace_re.sub(" ", data).strip()
            self.data_interrupt = False

parser = HTMLTableParser() 
parser.feed(sys.stdin.read())

One enhancement for this script could be to add support for specifying a different line delimiter (or auto-calculate the platform-correct one), and a different column delimiter.

user_293280 · Answer

Read HTML File and Use Ruby's `CSV` and `nokogiri` to Output to `.csv`.

Based on @audiodude's answer but modified in the following ways:

Reads from a file to get the HTML. This is handy for long HTML tables, but easily modified to just use a static String if your HTML table is small.
Uses CSV's built-in library for converting an Array into a CSV row.
Outputs to a .csv file instead of just printing to STDOUT.
Gets both the table headers (th) and the table body (td).

# Convert HTML table to CSV format.

require "nokogiri"

html_file_path = ""

html_string = File.read( html_file_path )

doc = Nokogiri::HTML( html_string )

CSV.open( Rails.root.join( Time.zone.now.to_s( :file ) + ".csv" ), "wb" ) do |csv|
  doc.xpath( "//table//tr" ).each do |row|
    csv << row.xpath( "th|td" ).collect( &:text ).collect( &:strip )
  end
end

user_16726329 · Answer

Depending on what you need you can simply:

var table ='';var selector='#customers';
document.querySelectorAll(`${selector} tr th`).forEach(h=>table+=`${h.innerText.trim()};`);table=table.trim();table+='
';
document.querySelectorAll(`${selector} tr`).forEach(tr=>{tr.querySelectorAll('td').forEach(td=>table+=`${td.innerText.trim()};`);table+='
';});

change "selector" to target your table and after executing "table" will have the contents of your csv

aditionally you can:

var a = document.createElement('a');a.href=`data:text/csv;base64,${btoa(table)}`;a.download="table.csv";a.click();

to download the contents of "table"

user_7656221 · Answer

you can convert html to csv using libreoffice or sed

libreoffice:

mkdir in out
cp -v *.html in
rename 's/([^.]+).html/$1.xls/g' in/*.html
## 59 is ;
## 44 is ,
libreoffice --convert-to 'csv:Text - txt - csv (StarCalc):59,,0,3' in/*.xls --outdir out

see https://developer-core.blogspot.com/2022/03/preobrazovanie-html-v-csv-ili-obrabotka-html-tablic-v-bash.html

or sed:

mkdir out
cp -v *.html out
sed -i ':a;N;$!ba
     s/]\+>//Ig
     s#\s*\s*\s*\s*\s*#
#Ig
     s#\s*\s*\s*#;#Ig
     s/<[^>]\+>//g;s/\s\{2,\}//g' out/*.html
rename 's/([^.]+).html/$1.csv/g' out/*.html

see https://developer-core.blogspot.com/2022/03/preobrazovanie-html-v-csv-ili-obrabotka-html-tablic-v-bash-v2.html

An example can be found in the online bash "sandbox": https://onlinegdb.com/1oivp0uGm

user_3266847 · Answer

Here's a method that uses pup and jq.

Assuming that infile.html contains one

element, we can select its rows using pup, and convert to JSON:

pup 'table tr json{}' --file infile.html

This returns an array of objects, with a children array for each row. For an example with a header row, two data rows, and three columns:

[
 {
  "children": [
   { "tag": "th", "text": "ID" },
   { "tag": "th", "text": "First name" },
   { "tag": "th", "text": "Last name" }
  ],
  "tag": "tr"
 },
 {
  "children": [
   { "tag": "td", "text": "123" },
   { "tag": "td", "text": "Anna" },
   { "tag": "td", "text": "Alphabet" }
  ],
  "tag": "tr"
 },
 {
  "children": [
   { "tag": "td", "text": "456" },
   { "tag": "td", "text": "Brandon" },
   { "tag": "td", "text": "Betazoid" }
  ],
  "tag": "tr"
 }
]

To convert that to CSV, we can use jq (see snippet):

pup 'table tr json{}' --file infile.html \
    | jq --raw-output 'map(.children | map(.text))[] | @csv'

resulting in

"ID","First name","Last name"
"123","Anna","Alphabet"
"456","Brandon","Betazoid"

How can I convert an HTML table to CSV?

21 Answers

Read HTML File and Use Ruby's CSV and nokogiri to Output to .csv.

Read HTML File and Use Ruby's `CSV` and `nokogiri` to Output to `.csv`.