Use web tools to process data in calc

[Noodle]

Hi, I want to take cell strings and use them as a variable in a web address and then return the first result to the next column.

So for example, I didn’t have much trouble taking a pile of Japanese words and automatically sorting them into one cell each, removing duplicates, and removing the blank row gaps. But now I want to apply each word into this web search:

http://m.jisho.org/words?jap=[VARIABLE]&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on

and then print the first result (unique selector: “body > p:nth-child(6)” in firefox development mode) to the next column over. The desired result obviously being a document which automatically takes a pile of japanese words, sorts them, and then provides an english translation from jisho.org.

So for example, for a3 it would search

http://m.jisho.org/words?jap=yusa&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on

and return the result for yusai, the closest match, and print

油彩 (yusai) Common word, Noun oil painting

to b3.

How do I do this?

Thank you very much for your help, I can’t find any information on doing this through searches.

[erAck]

You could experiment with the WEBSERVICE() function, but that returns the entire page so you’ll need to use FIND() or SEARCH() on it. If there was a parameter to the URI to return XML instead of HTML you could use FILTERXML() to extract XPath data.

[mariosv]

The issue with FILTERXML() is that it has a pending bug XMLpath in FIlterxml does not work with arrayfunction