this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
28 points (91.2% liked)

Firefox

17794 readers
29 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 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