Extract Table Pagination

Extract Table Pagination

When to invoke

When the user task involves reading structured data from an HTML table — the page either shows a ` element, or a role="table" ARIA structure. If the table is paginated, the skill walks pages via a "next" link/button until either the next link is absent, the row count stops growing, or a configurable max_pages` is reached.

The matcher gives this a high score when the DOM summary contains `-grid layout (card grid, masonry, etc.) — use the future extract-card-grid` skill, or vision fallback.

• The table is virtualized (only renders visible rows on scroll, e.g., AG Grid, MUI DataGrid). Use handle-infinite-scroll with row-extraction inside the scroll loop instead.
• The "table" is actually a layout ` from 2003-era HTML (no `, no semantic structure). The extractor will produce noisy results; better to extract by text-selector and structure manually.

Known failures

• Virtualized tables (~5% of modern web apps): only the visible rows are in the DOM at any time. The extractor returns just those. Workaround: combine with handle-infinite-scroll or scroll-and-extract.
• Tables with rowspan/colspan (~3%): the naive header-zip extractor mis-aligns columns. Vision fallback handles for now; v0.2.0 will support extract_table mode="rowspan-aware".
• **No `, no (~5% of legacy sites):** the extractor uses the first row as headers; if that row is data, the first record is lost. Workaround: pass headers=[...]` arg (planned v0.2.0).
• Server-side-rendered "infinite scroll" disguised as pagination: the next-page link returns the SAME rows on click. Detection logic in pagination-next-page aborts when row hashes match.

Example usage

Agent task: "Get the latest cs.AI papers from arxiv."
→ invoke_skill("verify-page-loaded") → success
→ invoke_skill("extract-table-pagination") → success, $rows_page_1 = [{title, authors, abstract}, ...]
→ agent inspects $rows_page_1 and reports

Related skills

• verify-page-loaded — run first; tables on slow-rendering pages need readiness check
• pagination-next-page — chain to walk multiple pages
• handle-infinite-scroll — alternative when content lazy-loads instead of paginating
• dismiss-cookie-banner — usually run before any extraction

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: bettyguo
• Source: bettyguo/browser-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.