can a web script or macro do this?

[FrontlineWarrior]

Hello all,

I have a very tedious task of looking up hospital diagnosis codes (ICD 9 codes) on this website:

http://www.lumrix.com/icd-9.php

and copying what it says.

For example, I look up "2780" and it outputs "obesity"

I have an excel file with all of these numbers in one column, and I want to input the text that the webpage spits out into a second column.

e.g.:

278.0 obesity
752.64 Micropenis
091 Early syphilis, symptomatic

...etc

Is that possible at all?

 

[Ka0t1x]

I don't know about writing something that can do that, but you might be able to get a CSV file from them, if the information is publicly available.

Never hurts to ask.

 

[sourceninja]

all webforms are going to be sent one of two ways.

GET or POST.

Either HTML or javascript submitted.

Once you figure that out, it's trivial to write a script to submit the proper values, then scrape the page to get the proper results.

 

[Duwelon]

If you can utilize .NET 2.0 or higher, the HtmlDocument and it's associated classes can do exactly what you want. Basically add a WebBrowser control to a windows form, and you can manipulate the document contained within. There's probably an easier way but I know for sure it's all built into the .NET 2.0+ framework.

 

[troytime]

with php you could use cURL, scraping a single page (with or without form data) is pretty easy.

 

[Ken g6]

Apparently these codes are in the public domain. (Don't trust Wikipedia, but the DHS MDB file might be useful to you.)

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

The site uses a simple GET request using the data string /icd-9.php?k=2780&suchen=search&f=lumrix-search&x=
Without knowing what programming languages you're familiar with it's impossible to give solid suggestions but I'd probably build a simple web scraper. You can use regular expressions to grab the data, it's 2am here so I'm not going to do a bunch of the leg work right now but you'd use a regex that looks something like >\d+(.\d)* ([a-zA-Z\s]+)< (this is because the data is presented in HTML like ...onMouseOut="window.status=''">278.01 Morbid obesity</a></.... Building a .csv file from this would be trivial.