Web Catalog Extraction Pipeline

Overview

The Web Catalog Extraction Pipeline was created when bibliographic and table-of-contents information already existed on websites and manual retyping was no longer the most efficient approach.

The problem changed from:

Type the Content

to:

Extract Only the Useful Content

Architecture

The workflow had two main stages: retrieve relevant web pages and process the downloaded HTML in batches.

Website
   ↓
HTML Grabber
   ↓
Local HTML Collection
   ↓
VBA Batch Processing
   ↓
Relevant Catalog Content
   ↓
Clean Output

HTML Acquisition

A grabber/extractor was written to retrieve the relevant pages and create a local collection of HTML documents.

VBA-Based HTML Processing

A second stage used VBA to process the downloaded pages.

Surviving source screenshots show logic that:

• iterated through numbered .htm files;
• opened files programmatically;
• changed document direction where needed;
• searched for text;
• removed unwanted content through repeated find/replace operations.

Visible operations include patterns such as:

Document.Open
Selection.Find
Text = ...
Replacement.Text = ""

Targeted Content Extraction

The objective was to preserve the section containing catalog or table-of-contents information and remove unrelated page content.

Downloaded HTML
      ↓
Open Page
      ↓
Identify Relevant Catalog Content
      ↓
Remove Unrelated Content
      ↓
Preserve Required Text

Why It Was a Separate Project

This was not merely another typing macro. It functioned as a small content-extraction / ETL-style pipeline:

Extract
Transform
Prepare

The cleaned content could then be reused in the wider bibliographic workflow.

Engineering Value

The project demonstrates web content acquisition, HTML processing, batch processing, VBA automation, content extraction, data cleanup and lightweight ETL thinking.

Portfolio Description

Built a lightweight catalog extraction pipeline that retrieved web pages and batch-processed the resulting HTML files through VBA, preserving the relevant catalog/table-of-contents content while removing unrelated page markup and text.

Website Card

Web Catalog Extraction Pipeline
HTML Grabber · VBA · Batch Content Processing

Built a lightweight extraction workflow that collected web pages and batch-processed them to retain catalog/table-of-contents content while removing unrelated page material.

Suggested Slug

/portfolio/web-catalog-extraction-pipeline

Evidence Boundaries

This portfolio entry describes the original historical project using only the currently recovered facts and surviving evidence. It does not claim a full web crawler framework or functionality not demonstrated by the historical workflow.