Today, I was tasked with scaping finish times from the London Marathon website and creating a dashboard in Tableau with my findings.
I used Alteryx to achieve this. I pasted the URL of the London Marathon results history page into the Download tool in Alteryx, to yield the table in html format. From here, I used regex to parse the column names and values from the original HTML into a usable table. This was a complex task due to the fact that there were nearly 1,000 pages of results for 25 runners ranked first to last. So, I developed an iterative macro in Alteryx which would alter the URL to change the page until there were no more new records to download. You can find my macro workflow below:
This took up the majority of my day and in hindsight, I definitely should have reduced scope so that I could have spent more time developing my dashboard in Tableau first, then go back to find data for additional years in Alteryx in order to supplement my story.