Exporting CSV data is returned as HTML rather than CSV.

Issue

We have had several cases where a customer robot attempts to export or download comma seperated file data from a web site that fails.

Typically the behavior reflects an attempt to store the resulting data set into a csv variable but instead the raw html is stored. And the raw html does not contain the data row content but is only the html data of the viewed page. This means that an extract from the html won't work because of a lack of content.

Within the robot we see this scenario resulting from a click step or an extract target step where the location is set to URL loaded when clicking. Both of these steps then attempt to load the resulting data set into csv but only get back the html.

Cause

The root cause of this problem is that the source server is not returning a complete set of information needed to do the conversion to csv. So far we have seen a couple of different causes; lack of necessary termination structures, and invalid mime types returned.

Solution

To solve this use a click step on the export/download location. Then insert an extract binary content step assigning the data to a simple bin variable. Then insert a convert variables step and convert the binary data to text. At this point the text variable will contain the csv data needed. The variable can then be used to store in db, write to file or whatever the use case requires.

Level of Complexity 

Moderate

Applies to  

References

Keywords: Kapow CSV, HTML Export, Kapow, Robotic Process Automation