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Extractors6 min

Picking the right columns

How pattern inference works, when it gets confused, and the four ways to correct it.

What happens when you click

Fyre walks up from the element you clicked until it finds an ancestor that repeats elsewhere in the document with a similar internal shape. That ancestor becomes the row. Everything distinguishable inside it becomes a candidate column: text nodes, links, images, and any attribute that varies between rows.

Column names come from whatever evidence exists — an aria-label, a microdata property, a nearby heading, a class name that reads like English. Where there is no evidence, the column is named by position and left for you to rename.

When it matches too few rows

Grids often mix layouts: a promoted card, a wide banner row, an ad slot. Clicking a second example teaches Fyre that both shapes are the same kind of thing, and it relaxes the pattern to cover them.

When it matches too many

The opposite problem — the pattern reached a container that also matches the footer links. Click the outlined element you do not want and choose Exclude, or step the row selector down one level using the breadcrumb at the top of the panel.

The four overrides

Every column can be redefined without leaving the panel.

  • Re-point: click a different element inside the row and the column follows it.
  • Attribute: switch from the visible text to href, src, datetime, data-* or any other attribute.
  • Selector: write a CSS selector scoped to the row when the visual picker cannot express what you mean.
  • Transform: apply trim, number parsing, date parsing, a regular expression capture, or a find-and-replace.
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