Use for loop in Browser Automation Studio

When creating an automation script, you will inevitably encounter many cases where you need to use loops. Some specific examples include extracting structured data from a list, or running a loop to find the position of a desired element, or simply running a loop to process logic.

This article will not be a pure tutorial but will go through some specific examples to guide you on how to use loops in BAS.

Example: Extract Post title in my Blog

Load target url

First, let's start by trying to load my website into BAS with the following url: https://gen9x.com/blog. You will see a list of posts. Suppose the problem is to export all the post names on this page. At this point, you will need to use a loop to process.

Understand CSS selector structure

Now to extract it, we need to find the location of the post titles. To do this, try right-clicking on the first post and selecting Get element text.

Then you will see the html path as CSS selector of the title paragraph as follows:

>CSS> :nth-child(1) > article > :nth-child(2) > :nth-child(1) > h2 > a

This time try again with the title of the second article to see how the path will change. The result after execution will have the following value:

>CSS> :nth-child(2) > article > :nth-child(2) > :nth-child(1) > h2 > a

So have you realized anything? The article titles have the exact same CSS selector structure, they only differ in the value inside nth-child.

Write for loop function

I will create a for loop running from 1 to 5. In this loop I will execute the function to get the text of the CSS selector with the following value:

>CSS> :nth-child([[CYCLE_INDEX]]) > article > :nth-child(2) > :nth-child(1) > h2 > a

[[CYCLE_INDEX]] is the value that will change from 1 to 5, And so I will get the title of the first post to the 5th post

After getting the value, I proceed to save it to the POST_TITLE boundary. To confirm that I have successfully extracted it, I will try to log this value using the Log function in BAS.

Tada, so with just 1 loop, I was able to extract all the post titles in my Blog page. Of course, there will be more things to handle if you want to complete it. For example, checking how many posts there are before running, or checking if a CSS selector value exists before extracting its text value...

This is a simple and concrete example to help you understand how to perform a loop in BAS. How to apply it will depend on each case of the problem to flexibly handle. Try to learn and practice to become more proficient.