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Scotty123 · 3 Aug 2017 at 15:45

I don't know about premade tools, but if I were doing it myself, I'd use Python, Selenium to scrape and the pyexcel package to generate the excel sheet (or insert into a current one).

peterwalkley · 3 Aug 2017 at 17:12

Seems like access is blocked outside Switzerland. Coming from the UK, I just get "Access to find a lawyer is not permitted from your country."

AHarvey · 3 Aug 2017 at 21:58

yep, Python + selenium or BeautifulSoup to scrape, just save it to a notepad file as a CSV then open with excel and saves as xlsx. No need to worry about programming the excel side of it then.

A quick google shows this: http://webscraper.io/

Kreeeee · 4 Aug 2017 at 08:36

AHarvey said:
yep, Python + selenium or BeautifulSoup to scrape, just save it to a notepad file as a CSV then open with excel and saves as xlsx. No need to worry about programming the excel side of it then.

A quick google shows this: http://webscraper.io/

It looks like they have protection built into the website to stop scraping. When I test this tool I get an "I am not a robot" form to fill out.

Edit: All the lawyer vCards are in the format "https://www.sav-fsa.ch/documents/anwaltssuche_vcard<firstname>_<lastname>_SAV<UID>.vcf"

I wonder if there is a way to access the "anwaltssuche_vcard" directory and pull all the .vcf files from there.

AHarvey · 5 Aug 2017 at 21:07

Kreeeee said:
I wonder if there is a way to access the "anwaltssuche_vcard" directory and pull all the .vcf files from there.

You may be able to use a website downloader to pull the entire website onto your machine, from there check to see if the folder you require is there.

MTA99 · 6 Aug 2017 at 10:43

As the others have said, a few ways to do this - personally I'd go with Python + Beautifulsoup. Spending 5 mins looking at the source and you could easily walk through each canton, sending post requests to the search page to get the results. Each result in the table has the info you need for the vcard download. The row ID is the UID, first and last name are there as text.

If you want all the extra info you'll need to use Selenium to push the right buttons to trigger the JS.

Kreeeee said:
It looks like they have protection built into the website to stop scraping. When I test this tool I get an "I am not a robot" form to fill out.

Make sure you've got nicely formatted user agent data to avoid the robot check.

Kreeeee · 17 Apr 2019 at 15:09

Skinus said:
If you don't want to do any coding yourself, you could use GrabzIt's Web Scraper. It is completely online and scrapes are created in a point and click way.

Phew, your response came just in time!

Also I can tell that it won't work for what I wanted back then anyway.