Webscraping an Academic Calendar

Question

Hi,

How can you web scrape an academic calendar from a website? I am trying to output the bold letters into a usable data table.

Here is the website: https://www.umassglobal.edu/news-and-events/academic-calendar

Here is what I want to extract from the website and into this format.

Summer Session I – 2024 – April 29, 2024 – June 23, 2024Summer Session II– 2024 – June 24, 2024 – August 18, 2024Fall Session I – 2024 – August 26, 2024 – October 20, 2024Fall Session II – 2024 – October 21, 2024 – December 15, 2024Spring Session I – 2025 – January 6, 2025 – March 2, 2025Spring Session II – 2025 – March 3, 2025 – April 27, 2025Summer Session I – 2025 – April 28, 2025 – June 22, 2025Summer Session II– 2025 – June 23, 2025 – August 17, 2025

Best,

Bryan

Raj · Answer

@bryanmac_92 
find the workflow attached
mark done if solved.

2123.yxmd

aatalai · Answer

@bryanmac_92 take a look at the workflow attached and let me know how you get on

Webscraping an Academic Calendar.yxmd

cmcclellan · Answer

There's always a "what's it worth" that you should think about when do any work like this.

As a consultant I would say .... you've got the table already (because you posted it) and it won't change (unless you want to pick up 2026 dates), but the manual effort to do this is minimal and the effort to get a workflow running and perfect is a lot more.  Usually it's the other way around the the effort to get the workflow running and execute to get different results will far outweigh the manual effort.

As a learning exercise (as in, who cares I want to write the workflow anyway) I'd use the Download tool and them process the HTML. You want to extract all the H3 formatted text and then further process that to only get the H3's that you want.