Possible to omit "web-scraper-order" and "web-scraper-start-url" columns for cleaner CSV output, and keep original table row order?

How to?
#1

Hi, Currently the CSV output automatically includes these 2 columns of "booking-keeping" data:

(a) web-scraper-order, and
(b) web-scraper-start-url

(1) Is there a way to skip output for these 2 columns? The reason is that I want to have a clean and simple output for clients who update their scraping on their own, with my customized sitemap on a daily basis.

Here's a sitemap for a table from W3schools.com:

{"_id":"test_table","startUrl":["https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp"],"selectors":[{"id":"table","type":"SelectorTable","selector":"div.w3-example table","parentSelectors":["_root"],"multiple":true,"columns":[{"header":"Company","name":"Company","extract":true},{"header":"Contact","name":"Contact","extract":true},{"header":"Country","name":"Country","extract":true}],"delay":"1000","tableDataRowSelector":"tr:nth-of-type(n+2)","tableHeaderRowSelector":"tr:nth-of-type(1)"}]}

(2) In a related issue, is there a way to keep the resulting rows in the original order? They currently come out all re-ordered.

Original order:
Alfreds Futterkiste
Centro comercial Moctezuma
...

Thanks in advance!

#2

HI!

If you want your results to be properly ordered, you have to use CouchDB instance on your machine.

Please refer to post here:

#3

Thanks for the reply. I am starting to use CouchDB with WebScraper.io, although not yet familiar with Views, eg.

However, in this particular case, I was looking for a "dummy" solution for a client to routinely scrape simple stock price page on their own, on their own browser, output for just Excel. I think it will still be OK to accept the 2 extra columns.

I would recommend everyone to set up the CouchDB storage. Not only can it help store larger data set, you can also access the data from another networked computer, with a URL other than 127.0.0.1:5984, such as with http://192.168.1.201:5984/_utils/#/_all_dbs

On the CouchDB page above, you can also have a clean list overview if you have several scraping instances.

Cheers!

#4

You can just highlight the columns in excel and select hide/delete