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Searching and retrieving information from a website

jleon14
5 - Atom

Hello everyone,

 

I need your help because I want to do something that I dont know if it can be done with Alteryx. I want to be able to search and retrieve specific information from a website to go into my workflow. I have a list of various address and I want to retrieve their coordinates. And i wanted to know if through Alteryx there is any tool that I can use so that I enter into the workflow all of these addresses and it inputs these addresses into a website that gives coordinates and outputs the results (which would be the coordinates) into the workflow. 

 

I feel that this can be done, but through all of the videos, tutorials and experimenting that I have done, I cannot seem to figure it out. 

 

If anyone has done something similar before or thinks they know if this can be done, I would greatly appreciate your help!!

 

Thank you!!!

3 REPLIES 3
jrgo
14 - Magnetar

Hi @jleon14,

 

This is primarily going to be dependent to the website you're utilizing and if they offer an API that Alteryx can submit a query to and have it return a result. Below is an example of an approach that uses Google Maps to send an address and parse out the returned HTML to get my coordinates. This is to serve mainly as an example and I don't recommend using this to process large amounts of addresses without reviewing Googles TOS to ensure you don't violate any of their usage agreements.

image.png 

 

Alternatively, if you subscribe to Alteryx spatial data add-on, it does include an address parser that'll return you coordinates and also the CASS (postal service) standardized address.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Jimmy

jleon14
5 - Atom

Thank you very much for you help, but I am having some trouble reverse engineering the equation. Since i dont know what to put mostly in the formula tool and the RegEx tool. I was thinking of using either:

 

https://gps-coordinates.org/

or

https://www.gps-coordinates.net/

 

To find the coordinates, is the second the one that you used?

 

I am fairly new to this Alteryx so any detailed help of how you did this will help me greatly at my job.

 

Thank you for all the help! 

jrgo
14 - Magnetar

Hi @jleon14,

 

The formula tool was used to simply concatenate the base URL to each address from the two Text Inputs that were appended together, but the regex tool is what i used to extract the lat/lon by looking for a pattern of data from the data that was downloaded. Unfortunately, explaining RegEx here would not be appropriate to do so as there's a lot more complexity behind it that you'll need to educate yourself on beforehand.

 

I didn't use either of those, but just google.com/maps.

 

Those websites you provided, however, look to be using java scripting to process your request. Unfortunately, neither look like they'll work in the manner i demonstrated. The second link does look like it offers some API functionality, but looking at their documentation, it seems to be limited to only allowing you to request locations that you've entered and labeled beforehand manually.

 

You may also search through https://gallery.alteryx.com... i believe there may already be a macro out there that does what you're attempting.

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