Help with Bravenet Guestbook Data Extraction

[lloyd_borrett]

G'day there,

I'd been using Bravenet's Guestbook service on my web site for some time as I didn't have access to any scripting and/or databases with my previous hosting provider.

Now that I've switched to JaguarPC (great service guys!) I'm looking to change from Bravenet to an implementation of Advanced Guestbook.

However, I have more than 2000 entries in my Bravenet Guestbook that I would like to transfer into the Advanced Guestbook MySQL database.

Bravenet don't provide a data backup/restore service, thus I can't get the data in a nice database friendly form.

What I can do is save the 100+ web pages of the bravenet Guestbook to disk, and then try and extract the information from the tables into a database/file.

Has anyone had any experience grabbing such data from web page code?

What, if any, open source / freeware tools are available that I might find useful? (I haven't been able to locate anything so far, but I'm a real newbie in this area, so I might not even be looking for the right things!)

Any advice, comments, suggestions would be most welcome.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

[jason]

Copy and paste. I know its not the answer you wanted, but its probably the easiest way. The other option is to write a script or program that will go to the Bravenet site, grab the pages and parse them out for the content. Depending on how good they've made they're markup this can be really easy (if you have programming experience) or a real pain in the ###, and with most sites its usually the latter. If you're not a programmer and you aren't really familiar with writing HTML without a WYSIWYG editor then I wouldn't suggest even trying this approach. It is probably much more complicated than its worth.

I've never used any of Bravenets scripts, so I'm not familiar with how they set things up or whether anyone has written any conversion/backup scripts for their offerings. If you haven't already, try searching sites like hotscripts.com and resourceindex.com and see if you can find anything.

--Jason