How do I obtain data from a table from a website into MATLAB
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Im working on a project to track fire calls in in rockland county and to do that there is a websight that has all calls in the last 24 hours how do I collect the data from the websight into matlab. I've tred using web read but I can't find the call data in the output it gives.
Also how do I deal with repeate data everytime I webscrape the sight
4 Comments
There doesn't appear to be any data in that page. It's all loaded from somewhere else, and it's not obvious to me where 'somewhere else' is.
v = websave('history','https://firewatch.44-control.net/history.html')
T1 = readtable(v)
type(v)
.
Moshe
on 25 Apr 2025
Star Strider
on 25 Apr 2025
There are nly two options I can think of.
The firsi is to copy the entire table manually and paste it into a text editor or spreadsheet. This will require parsing it manually as well. Then you can read it using readtable.
The second is to contact the website owner and ask them if there is a way to access the table informaiton. There might be. Since that might not produce immediate results, unless you have an absolutely urgent need for that information, (in which instance the copy-paste-parse-readtable approach is the only option), that would be how I would approach this.
I got as far as extracting the table headers and then realized that the table content appears to be dynamically loaded after the page is loaded so webread will not see it. I confirmed this by viewing the page source where the table content is missing (it's visible in Inspect Element view but that's not what webread sees). You could used a 3rd party API or try to save the page in a format that could be used with MATLAB's readtable or webread.
url = "https://firewatch.44-control.net/history.html";
data = webread(url);
tree = htmlTree(data);
tableNode = findElement(tree, "table#maintable");
headerNodes = findElement(tableNode, "th");
headers = extractHTMLText(headerNodes)
Accepted Answer
Seth Furman
on 5 May 2025
Edited: Seth Furman
on 5 May 2025
For reference, readtable now works directly on urls, but as @Adam Danz pointed out, the data on this webpage is loaded dynamically so that approach still won't work in this case.
readtable("https://firewatch.44-control.net/history.html")
That said, you can manually download the rendered HTML from the webpage and read it into MATLAB using readtable.
readtable("44-Control Firewatch - Previous Incidents.txt",FileType="html")
1 Comment
Looks like the raw data come from https://firewatch.44-control.net/status.json, so you can use readstruct to get the data and struct2table to convert the data into a table.
s = readstruct("https://firewatch.44-control.net/status.json")
struct2table(s.Fire)
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