I was tired of wasting time Alt-tabbing between Digi-key and Microsoft Access with my database library. Beyond that, when I started working for a company that used Omnify to pull new part numbers, I had a web interface requiring hundreds of clicks to put in all the correct part information. Surely there is a better way!
I had done some web scraping before using Visual Basic, but it was a bit cumbersome and unreliable. It used a built-in web browser control on a vb form, and half the problem was figuring out when a page was done loading. After having experienced the pain of an unreliable tool, I did some research to find out what other people were doing to solve this problem. I stumbled across Joe Glines Auto-Hotkey tutorials for scraping web pages, and this uncovered a much, much more repeatable way of loading pages and scraping them with relative ease.
I’m planning on releasing some tutorials, but for now, if you’d like to download a basic scraper for Digi-key, enter your email in the form below and I will send you a link to download it. Simply copy a valid Digi-key URL onto the clipboard, and run the AHK script, and it will update the clipboard with a series of fields that you can paste into Excel.