How to get data Dr. Steven Bitner Announcement HW # 8 is now due - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How to get data Dr. Steven Bitner

Announcement  HW # 8 is now due on Thanksgiving (Nov 22 nd )  Pause for booing  This assignment was supposed to be due on Tuesday, so if you did the assignment, then you’ve got nothing to worry about  This delay is due to some permissions and access problems that some individuals were having with the assignment  Please do not delay in notifying me if you cannot complete the assignment. I can’t help if I don’t know

KC PUG (PHP User’s Group) meeting  This Saturday (17 November) at 2:30pm  Location: Red Nova Labs  4830 Rainbow Blvd, Westwood, KS  5% extra credit  Option a: present a short (< 5 minutes) brief to present to the class covering what you learned  Option b: minimum 300 word summary of the meeting turned in to me

Data is everywhere  Except in your handy little database

Find a source  Can be an existing DB  Find a spreadsheet with the data  Find a website with the data  Last resort, hand typing it

In an existing database?  Use the database export functionality to create the SQL needed to get the data on your server  If you can’t create SQL from the database (many versions of Access are this way), save it as a CSV (comma delimited file)

In a spreadsheet  If it is in a spreadsheet, simply save the sheet as a CSV file that you can use to import  e.g. UMKC course listing

Use MS Excel  Click on the “data” tab  Click on “from web”  Enter in the url of the site with the table  e.g. http://www.fedjobs.com/pay/restofus.html  Click on the arrow next to the table you want and Excel does the rest

Excel solution  Obviously much easier than manually copying/pasting the data yourself  Extremely limited  Websites using <div> instead of <table> for layout won’t work  Many websites using table still don’t work

Importing a CSV in phpMyAdmin  Must be CSV  Limited by max_file_upload parameter  Column headers will be added as rows, so delete them if they exist  If you insert into an existing table, the column count must match up or you have to define the column matchings

Spiders  When all else fails, you can hand-jam the data, or write a custom spider  Useful if you need to routinely fetch new data  Also useful if the data set is very large but consistently formatted