I was leveraging the jQuery auto-complete plugin today and my client asked me if I can store all the major cities in the United States. I managed to find a list through wiki, however, it is a HTML table with 273 rows surrounded with HTML tags, my goal here is to get entire city columns, join with single quotes and a comma, then apply them to the auto-complete plugin.

Input:

Desire Output:
'New York',
'Los Angeles'

Here is my approach:

wget en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
awk -v s="'" -v e="'," '{print s $2 e}' filename

The v argument gives you the ability to define simple variable and creates flexibility for automation.

Want to learn more about awk, read this awesome tutorial.

I later discovered an even better approach by relying on Jquery. I first include jquery by using an user script by joanpiedra

Refresh the wiki page to get Jquery included in this page, then I use the following JavaScript in Firebug to populate the data:

$("#sortable_table_id_0 tr td:nth-$("table tr td:nth-child(2)").each(function(){
   var t = $(this).text();
   console.log(t); 
});

Wow, all data gets populated in the firebug console. The rest will be simple copy and paste.

Update:

If you are a mootools fan, you can achieve the same goal with the same code, as long as you have injected mootools into the page, as introduced below:

$('#sortable_table_id_0 td:nth-child(2)').each(function(){
   var t = $(this).text();
   console.log(t); 
});

You will also need to inject mootools into this page, the following script, a slight modification base upon joanpiedra's user script:

// ==UserScript==
// @name          Mootools
// @namespace     http://www.joanpiedra.com/jquery/greasemonkey
// @description	  Play nicely with Mootools and Greasemonkey
// @author        Joan Piedra
// @homepage      http://www.joanpiedra.com/jquery/greasemonkey
// @include       *
// ==/UserScript==


// Add mootools
var GM_JQ = document.createElement('script');
GM_JQ.src = 'http://www.mootools.net/download/get/mootools-1.2.3-core-nc.js';
GM_JQ.type = 'text/javascript';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ);