WIP

This project is a work in progress (WIP) and not ready for public consumption.

A backlog of additions, features, and changes are kept in the issues list

Overview

This is an Excel Addin that retrieves text from a URL and can parse it with regular expressions. Two new functions will be added to Excel:

1. regexReplace, which exposes the regular expression replace function of .NET
2. getDataAtUrl, which retrieves a file at a given URL The two functions together provide a means to retrive and parse out infromation from a web server. See the Use section below for an example.

Install

There are probably other ways to install this, but the following method worked for me:

1. Download getDataAtUrl-AddIn-packed.xll or getDataAtUrl-AddIn64-packed.xll (get the one that corresponds with your version of Excel) from getDataAtUrl/bin/Release
2. In Excel, open Excel Options. This can be done by clicking File then Options
3. Click Add-ins
4. Set the Manage drop-down to Excel Add-ins, then click Go...
5. Click Browse and using the file navigator, select the .xll that you just retrieved
6. Click OK

Use

Once the addin is installed (or run-once), use the regexReplace and getDataAtUrl functions like any other excel function. Give this a try by entering it into a cell

=regexReplace(getDataAtUrl("https://www.glerl.noaa.gov//metdata/mil/"),"[\u0001-~]*<strong>Air Temperature[\u0001-~]+?>(.+?)&.*<\/td><[\u0001-~]*","$1")

and see what the temperature is in Milwaukee.

Build and development

This section documents how to build and develop for the project

getDataAtUrl

TBD

UnitTests

TBD

Dependencies

TBD