trouble shooting – the-Automator

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey: Troubleshooting Web Scraping

When building my first scraping scripts I used to waste a ton of time trying to figure out what was broken. Adding some structure to your diagnoses process can greatly speed-up detecting what has gone wrong. A copy of the AutoHotKey syntax writer can be found here.

I think some excellent advice, not exclusive to troubleshooting web scraping, is to have a bobble-doll or something to talk to. Pretend you’re explaining your issue to a friend and often, when you hear yourself say the words, your issue will appear to you.

This video offers some general troubleshooting tips around troubleshooting web scraping when using AutoHotKey.

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey: Troubleshooting

Debug with SciTE and AutoHotKey

Debugging can be very time consuming. If you’re using SciTE with AutoHotKey, there is built-in functionality that is very helpful. This video walks through some of the cool debugging features in SciTE. I also have a second debugging with SciTE video that you should check out after watching this one.

Make sure you take the time to review both videos! I guarantee it will increase your speed of developing code and trouble-shooting issues!

Debug with SciTE

Below is the AutoHotKey script I used in the video:

#SingleInstance, Force
#NoEnv
Var:=0

OutputDebug Line %A_LineNumber%: A_Index is: %A_Index% and Var is: %Var%
GoSub Looper
MsgBox end of program
return

;***********************First loop********************************.
Looper:
loop, 15
{
var:=Var+A_Index
OutputDebug Line %A_LineNumber%: A_Index is: %A_Index% and Var is: %Var%
var:=Var+10
GoSub SubLooper
}
return

;***********************Sub loop********************************.
SubLooper:
Loop, 3
{
SubLooperVar:=A_Index
OutputDebug Line %A_LineNumber%: A_Index is: %A_Index% and Var is: %Var% and Sublooper index is: %SubLooperVar%
}
return