Screen Scrape with Powershell

I am sure there is all sorts of technical, legal or ethical reasons why you shouldn’t do it, however sometimes its much needed. Powershell is that knight in shining armor which will save your day.

In this example I am snatching information from wikipedias SO_3166-1

as you see in the code is split a very useful information to pin out the information needed, do be aware that your code will fail as soon as the provider changes his format.

The code…

$ISO3166 = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1" -UseBasicParsing

$Countries = ((($ISO3166.Content -split "<table class=`"wikitable sortable`"")[2] -split "</TABLE>")[0]) -split "<tr>" | Select-Object -Skip 2
 
if ($Countries.Count -eq 0) {
 Write-Warning "oh crap no Countries found"
 Continue
}
 
foreach ($Cty in $Countries) {
 
 $country = $null
 $alpha02 = $null
 $alpha03 = $null
 $numeric = $null

 #Decode html
 $country = (($Cty -split "<td>")[1] -split "</td>")[0]
 $alpha02= (($Cty -split "<td>")[2] -split "</td>")[0]
 $alpha03= (($Cty -split "<td>")[3] -split "</td>")[0]
 $numeric= (($Cty -split "<td>")[4] -split "</td>")[0]

 #Special decoding
 $country = (($country -split ">")[1] -split "<")[0]
 $alpha02= (($alpha02 -split "<span style=`"font-family: monospace, monospace;`">")[1] -split "</span>")[0]
 $alpha03= (($alpha03 -split "<span style=`"font-family: monospace, monospace;`">")[1] -split "</span>")[0]
 $numeric= (($numeric -split "<span style=`"font-family: monospace, monospace;`">")[1] -split "</span>")[0]

 #Output results
 $returnObject = New-Object System.Object
 $returnObject | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name country -Value $country
 $returnObject | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name alpha02 -Value $alpha02
 $returnObject | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name alpha03 -Value $alpha03
 $returnObject | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name numeric -Value $numeric
 
 Write-Output $returnObject
}