click through several links on webpage and extract information from each? - html

Question

I have access a webpage with a list of several hyperlinks, each of which are unique. This is it:
webpage I have access to that lists names from top to bottom. Each name is unique and is a hyperlink. I would like to click on these hyperlinks one by one and extract info from the resulting webpage.
Say I click the first name, say Adam, it then brings me to the following webpage:
alt:this is a page of the user's profile and includes info such as name, email status and more
My goal is to create a program that clicks the name at the top, and then takes the email address and puts it in an excel spreadsheet on my local machine. And then goes back to the original page, clicks on the name directly below the name that was previously clicked on, and then takes this names resulting email and throws it in the spreadsheet.
for those looking at the pictures, i would like to click on 'Adam' and then put his email into a spreadsheet, then go back, and then click on 'Adrian' and then put his email into a spreadsheet, and so on and so forth down the list.
What do I need to do/learn to create a tool that will do this for me?
I know a bit of Java and a tiny bit of html. I've been trying to look for a solution but the most I can get is excel vba to click on the first name, but not much more. Even if I got the vba to click on all the names, it seems I would have to type in an instruction for the vba to find each unique name, and I dont see much point in doing that since its probably faster to just do this manually then.
As i'm not a programmer (but would like to be soon :)) I have had some trouble asking this question since I don't know any technical terms.
Any thoughts/advice on how to do this?

Answer 1

With javascript and a little php you could make this happen. Since it appears this is something running in the browser it would probably be your best bet.
Make your program click links js has the ability to activate links. You could
click on body load
the first link on the page,
then have a counter that counts each time you click a link.
`Find out how many links there are in the document:`
var x = document.links.length;`
`Get the URL of the first link (index 0) in the document:`
`var x = document.links[0].href;`
Click the link you want to click
$(function(){
$('#myLink').trigger('click');
})
now that your on the next page you need to grab the email address that is on this page. If you know the css just grab the string that is in the element. at this point you can use javascript to go back to the previous page.
<button onclick="goBack()">Go Back</button>
Now you are on the original page. Your counter is one number higher. Use the counter to click the next link and your program will repeat the process pushing the new email to your array.
var fruits = ["Banana", "Orange", "Apple", "Mango"];
fruits.push("Kiwi");
once the program runs out of links to click or hits the limit of your counter you will need to create a txt file with javascript. write your array to the file with PHP. You can do this with an ajax call.
make an AJAX call to your php file passing the array. php can then write to the file.
Here is an example of making a text file and writing to it with javascript
Following this logic you can fairly easy make an application that activates the links in order of a page, pushes the email address to an array as a string. Goes back to the previous page and continues the process till you have all the links. At this point your program will write all the data in the array to a file.