Gathering the Data: RPA in Action
The first step of my project was to fetch the data from Billboard's Year End Hot 100 list for that. At first I thought it would be easy to gather the information from billboard’s website, but the page was not structured in a way that I could easily change the year and fetch the whole list, so I used Wikipedia instead to fetch the list. Wikipedia provided a table with all the songs, but I had to investigate each year at a time (meaning a lot of copy and paste in a repetitive task...). But repetitive tasks are the most suitable processes for automation, and that was what I did: I used UI Path to create a robot that will retrieve Billboard's Year End Hot 100 from 1980 to 2019 and increment the information with results from Google. It was interesting to build the robot, because I had to overcome some situations that I had not foresaw. I had no problems gathering the list from Wikipedia, my problems started when I was getting the additional information from Google. The full li...