Is there anyone that has considered how to import data from external sources, especially those that do not have any prepared an well-defined API?
A rather simple example from the website for Statistics Norway is an article on a website like this http://www.ssb.no/fobstud/ and a table like this http://www.ssb.no/fobstud/tab-2002-11-21-02.html
In that example you must follow a link to a new page which you then must monitor for changes. Inside that page you can use Xpath to to extract a field, and then optionally use something like a regexp to identify and split fields. As an alternate solution you might use XLT to transform the whole page.
Anyhow, this can quite easily be formulated both as a parser function and a tag function.
At the same site there is something called "Statistikkbanken" (http://statbank.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/) where you can (must) log on and then iterate through a sequence of pages.
Similar data as in the previous example can be found in http://statbank.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/selectvarval/Define.asp?MainTable=Fo... But it is very difficult to formulate a kind of click-sequence inside that page.
Any idea? Some kind of click-sequence recording?
Statistics Norway publish statistics about Norway for free reuse as long as they are credited as appropriate. http://www.ssb.no/english/help/
John