Here are some handy code segments that have taken me a little while to work out. Greasemonkey is a useful Firefox plugin with a massive shared library of scripts to do interesting things like adding collapsible folders to your online gmail web page. You can also write your own javascript code for Greasemonkey to apply to web sites you name.
The following code I use for a mystery shopping website I visit regularly but their table of possible assignments available in London can be several pages long. This script helps filter and colour in the table with my preferences (for example out of 80 London assignments I currently have 7 highlighted as suitable).
// ==UserScript==
// @name Website filter
// @namespace Filters
// @include http://mywebsite.com
/* Here I'm searching out items in a table that have been
highlighted in bold already. I'm then searching the bold
text and if it contains "William", I then hide the row
completely. I then go on to pick out items with "London"
in the text in dark green */
var allElements, thisElement;
allElements = document.evaluate(
'//tr/td/b',
document,
null,
XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
null);
for (var i = 0; i < allElements.snapshotLength; i++) {
thisElement = allElements.snapshotItem(i);
// Hide these rows
if(thisElement.innerHTML.search(/William/i)>=0) {
thisElement.parentNode.parentNode.style.display="none";
}
// Highlight these elements
if(thisElement.innerHTML.search(/London/i)>=0) {
thisElement.style.color="darkgreen";
}
}
/* In this section I'm searching for any table cell and
checking the text for certain postcodes and addresses.
If there is a match, the cell is highlighted in bold
blue text. */
allElements = document.evaluate(
'//td',
document,
null,
XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
null);
for (var i = 0; i < allElements.snapshotLength; i++) {
thisElement = allElements.snapshotItem(i);
// Highlight these addresses
if(thisElement.innerHTML.search(/SE(22|15|1\s)|London Bridge/i)>0) {
with(thisElement.style){
color="blue";
fontWeight="bold";
}
}
}
// ==/UserScript==
ExplanationsRegular expressions (Regex) can be a bit cryptic but as you'll need to tailor these in the above code I though I'd explain what these bits do:
search(/William/i) ==> Search anywhere in the string for "William" and return the starting position within the string, the 'i' means that it will not be case sensitive.
search(/SE(22|15|1\s)|London Bridge/i) ==> Search anywhere in the string for "SE22", "SE15", "SE1 " or "London Bridge", ignore case and return the position.
You will also note that the first search that hides matching rows uses
parentNode twice on the assumption that the bold text will be in a cell which will be in a row, so the second parent node is the "TR" tag containing the row. By changing the style.display attribute this dynamically hides the row from view (to reset and show the row again you would set style.display to null). Phew.
Useful linksGreasemonkey:
https://addons.mozilla.orgXPath syntax:
http://www.w3schools.com/XPath
