Testing the Generated Specification¶

When the specification is ready, it can be tested to check that it really extracts the desired data from the web page. Click on the “Specification Test” button of the Extractor wizard, to open the testing pane. On this pane, and making sure that the browser is in the mails page, click the “Refresh results” button. After the wait dialog closes, the Specification Test pane will display a table with all the results that were extracted from the web page using the generated DEXTL program (Data extracted from the page).

Data extracted from the page¶

If the results are incorrect, go back to the browser and correct the erroneous examples or add new ones, importing them again and testing until all the results are extracted correctly. The following cases are possible:

• If fewer results than expected are obtained, new examples should be added. The examples should be chosen from the results that the system has not extracted.

• If more results than expected are retrieved or some result is extracted incorrectly, the options “Disambiguate” and “Strict Patterns” may be used as explained in the description of the Generation pane. FROM and UNTIL options can also be used to further delimitate the area where the desired results are located in the page.

• Alternatively, the generated DEXTL program can be modified manually (if doing this, we recommend users to carefully read ITPilot DEXTL Guide); this option is selected by clicking on the button. The automatically generated program can now be modified.

In Data extracted from the page all the twenty e-mail messages of the inbox have been extracted correctly, so the Extractor component does not need more configurations. Click “Ok” to accept the current values and close the wizard.