this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I really like comparison tables on wikipedia but find them hard to navigate.

For example: Comparison of web browsers > General Information

Say I want a web browser for Linux which has been recently updated. I can sort by the "Platform" column, or by "Latest release: Date" but not both.

Sometimes tables can be very wide and/or very tall. Once you get to scrolling it is impossible to see either the row or column headings. So then you can't tell where you even are in the table. Example: Table of AMD processors Also they can have complex structures with merged headings and content.

Ideally I would like to apply some basic spreadsheet-type operations like hiding rows/columns, filtering, sorting by multiple columns etc. Even if there was a way to easily get the table into an actual spreadsheet that would be helpful. I tried some extensions that export tables to other formats but nothing worked without a lot of cleanup.

Is there some kind of trick or tool or extension that makes these ginormous tables useful? I can't tell how people even add information to these things, they are so large.

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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 11 months ago

The tables from Wikipedia will usually copy and paste into LibreOffice Calc. Just make sure you select the full table and nothing else. It takes forever to paste if there are lots of images in the table though.

[–] Bronco1676@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 months ago

Don't know how techy you are, but I've had some luck with using pandas for stuff like this, though I don't know how good it works on wikipedia.

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.read_html.html

You can either do the filtering directly on the resulting pandas datframes or export it to whatever format you like including excel or csv

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.to_excel.html

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.to_csv.html

[–] 0oWow@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are some addons for Firefox that can extract tables and other things. Search “tables” in the addon store and see what’s there.

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago

I tried the ones I found but they choke on these complicated tables