The day started at 8:45, I arrived in the office to be greeted with a grinning Lorna who had prepared the cheesiest challenge of the week.

We were tasked with web scraping a website dedicated to cheese, cheese.com. This task was made difficult as we were tasked to also get further information on the cheese types but you had to click on the cheese to be taken to a different page. to make matters worse we were given 3 letters in the 25 letter alphabet according to some, I was given g,h,i so this meant I had to get all cheese's that began with these letters.

This was the alteryx workflow I got to in the end after my nested batch macro to pull the page number and letters failed me.

Essentially you have a batch macro that replaces the page number and the letter in the formula tool which is fed into the main workflow . Here the URL input has been converted to a macro input and then split the URL to get the wanted letter and page number then with a control parameter the letter and page number is replaced when fed in by a text input.

Here is also my failed nested batch macro with similar logic. With this then fed back into the original workflow.

This is the text input. with what will be replaced this is fed into the upside down question mark. Once the pagination is done we can then download the data and start passing it out. the first regex is set to tokenize and split to rows and this was done on the part that was repeated before every name. then just parse out the names with another regex as usual. then I wanted to use these names and combine them with the URL beginning to get the URL of the specific cheese websites. Then I put a second download tool and started parsing and replacing the text to get information on the Country of origin, flavour etc..

Once this was done we then had to output the data to tableau and start building our cheese boards.

Before you ask the colour scheme is based on mature cheddar and not roman themed.

Given the limited time spent on building a dashboard (an hour and a half) due to the data prep shown above this was the end result.

This was overall a very enjoyable task and found out a lot about cheese, so as an after thought what is your cheese of the day? (there is only one correct answer ... Halloumi)