CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xpathgoogle-sheetsgoogle-sheets-formula
farmlandbee
farmlandbee

Reputation: 405

Can't get the data using importXML from Dynamic Web Page?

The website is : https://www.futbin.com/18/player/2600/Ayhan/

I inspect the element and get the XPath which is: //*[@id="ps-lowest-1"]

Then I use:

=IMPORTXML("https://www.futbin.com/18/player/2600/Ayhan/","//*[@id='ps-lowest-1']")

To get the data which should be 2000

But instead it only shows: - on the sheet. No errors just doesn't show the data that I want it to. Is there anyway to get the data that I need?

Thanks

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5760

Answers (1)

user6655984
user6655984

Reputation:

The Sheets command importXML reads only the HTML source of the page without executing any JavaScript on it. As you can see yourself by using "view source" in the browser, the source indeed has "-" in that span:

 <span class="price_big_right">
     <span id="ps-lowest-1">-</span>
 </span>

The actual numbers are loaded by some JavaScript file which then inserts them in that span. Neither importXML nor other Sheets functions can retrieve dynamically inserted data.

Sometimes, after inspecting the JS files, one can uncover the URL of source of data and try to import that; but this is a tedious reverse engineering exercise for each particular site.

Upvotes: 3

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