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POTesting if HTML table is used for layout vs. data?
 

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  1. POTesting if HTML table is used for layout vs. data?
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    <p>This is more of a web scraping question. What are the recognized approaches to automatically determining if a <code>&lt;table&gt;</code> is used for layout vs. is used for <em>data</em> in some HTML document you've never seen before?</p> <p>I'd like to be able to pass in any HTML file as a string into some function that spits out all of the <em>data tables</em> in an HTML page, but ignores tables used purely for layout. But sites like <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments</a> use HTML tables for layout, which makes it tricky.</p> <p>This function shouldn't be tailored to any specific websites' DOM structure, so it should work with any HTML string (or have as high a success rate as possible).</p> <p>Are there any algorithms/checks people have figured out over the years that can distinguish between layout and data tables? It should be possible, it's just a matter of writing down all the variables and trial/error - which I imagine many people have already mapped out somewhere.</p> <p>I don't necessarily need the function (that would be awesome though, but I imagine it would require a lot of fine-tuning). Just looking for some tried strategies.</p> <p><strong>Update</strong></p> <p>Here's a good start (thanks @JaredFarrish):</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/199/" rel="nofollow">A Machine Learning Based Approach for Table Detection on The Web</a></li> <li>Keywords: Table Detection, Layout Analysis, Machine Learning, Decision tree, Support Vector Machine, Information Retrieval</li> </ul>
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    1. CO"Sites like" is probably going to be a bit more extensive than a few (unfortunately). This sounds like a research paper topic; maybe someone has done one already, recently?
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    2. COIn fact, Jakob Nielsen might have something on it at his website; he seems the sort to develop these types of identity heuristics.
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    3. COYeah, I guess I'm looking for a research paper on the topic. I haven't been able to find any b/c I don't really know what the field/topic is exactly. If anyone knows of a good paper to start with that's all I am asking for - not a generic paper on web scraping though, found a lot of those :).
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