Python script to extract table data from Google Docs document via link

[WhisperingWind]

I have a published Google Docs document that contains a table with important data. I need to write a Python program that can access this document through its public URL and pull out all the information from the table.

I’ve been trying different approaches but nothing seems to work properly. First I attempted using the requests library to fetch the page content, but I couldn’t figure out how to parse the table structure correctly. Then I looked into Google’s official Docs API, but the authentication process and API calls keep giving me error messages that I don’t understand.

What would be the best way to accomplish this task? Should I stick with web scraping using requests and BeautifulSoup, or is there a more reliable method using Google’s APIs? I just need to get the table contents into a format I can work with in Python, like a list or dictionary.

[alexlee]

Had this same issue last month pulling inventory data from our Google Docs. Skip the HTML parsing - CSV export is way cleaner. Just swap your document URL to /export?format=csv instead of the sharing link, then use pandas.read_csv() to load it straight into a DataFrame. You’ll dodge all the HTML mess and get clean data instantly. CSV keeps your table structure intact and you won’t fight with nested tags or auth issues. Just make sure the doc’s set to public viewing.

[Alice45]

yea, the docs api can be tricky. i just switched the google doc url to /export?format=html and used beautifulsoup to scrape the table data. way easier and it worked like a charm!

[HappyDancer99]

I’ve had good luck using Google Docs’ exportLinks feature with a direct HTTP request. Just swap ‘/edit’ in the sharing URL with ‘/export?format=tsv&gid=0’ and you’ll get tab-separated values. TSV handles complex tables way better than CSV, especially when you’ve got commas or mixed data types in your cells. Then use Python’s csv module with a tab delimiter to parse everything. Best part? No authentication needed if the doc’s set to public viewing.