What is this?
This is a study of formatting used by modern web browsers when copying HTML tables in a plain text format to the clipboard. This study is not in any way biased towards a particular browser; ultimately all I am looking for is formatting that tabular data can be extracted from with a parsing algorithm!
Why did you do this study?
I am at the time of writing this, developing a web based data management system. Part of the system requires data from tables on a third party website to be copied into it. Copying and pasting a large amount of data, cell by cell from an ever growing number of tables, takes an unacceptably long time, it's just not practical to do it that way. I need a way to copy and paste the entire table at once (note, you can't ask the user to copy and paste from the HTML source code, especially when it's large and messy).
If you copy an entire table at once and paste into a text editor, you'll find that there's a structure to it! This gave me high hopes that I could have the user paste an entire table into a text box (HTML textarea) and process it with PHP to extract the data. However, the formatting varies between browsers, and hence the reason for this study - to research the differences, in order to produce a cross browser parsing algorithm, or, failing that, as a research document to attach to bug reports in which I will plead for improvements so I can do so.
Results
You will find the test itself along with the test data, results and analysis for each browser here:
Overall conclusion
My overall conclusion from analysing all of the browsers in the study:
News
Any updates to the situation can be found here: