Google Forms is a useful tool for creating surveys, questionnaires, quizzes, and other forms that you can share with others and collect data from them. However, sometimes you may need to extract the answers submitted to a Google Form programmatically rather than manually going through each submission. In this article, we will cover how to use inspect element with Golang code to extract the answers of a Google Form.
What is Inspect Element?
Inspect Element is a tool included in most web browsers, allowing developers to check the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of web pages. It is also called Developer Tools or DevTools, and it is useful for debugging, analyzing, and testing websites and web applications.
You can access Inspect Element by right-clicking on a web page and selecting the option “Inspect” or pressing F12 on your keyboard. Once you open Inspect Element, you can navigate through the Document Object Model (DOM) tree, modify the source code, and interact with the web page’s components.
How to Use Inspect Element to Get Google Forms Answers?
Google Forms stores the submissions’ answers in its own database, which is not publicly accessible. However, we can extract the answers from a Google Form by analyzing its HTML DOM tree and sending HTTP requests to simulate form submissions.
Let’s take a look at the steps involved in inspecting Google Forms with Inspect Element.
Step 1: Get the Google Form’s ID
To extract the answers of a Google Form, we need to know its unique ID, which is a long string of characters located in the URL of the form. For example, the ID of this Google Form’s URL is highlighted in bold:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc829AIpX5xocuOOQJPZskjS20TlR1f6zkyonuCJS5fzvLXzw/viewform
The ID is “1FAIpQLSc829AIpX5xocuOOQJPZskjS20TlR1f6zkyonuCJS5fzvLXzw”.
Step 2: Inspect the Google Form’s HTML
Once you have the Google Form’s ID, you can open it in your web browser and inspect its HTML code using Inspect Element. On the Google Form’s web page, right-click and select Inspect Element or press F12 on your keyboard. The Inspect Element panel will open, showing the DOM tree of the web page.
Use the search bar to find the form element corresponding to the Google Form, which usually has the ID attribute equal to the Google Form’s ID. In our example, the form element has the ID “mG61Hd”. You can expand the form element to see its child elements, such as input fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and submit buttons, among others.
Step 3: Send an HTTP POST Request to Simulate a Form Submission
To extract the answers of a Google Form, we need to send an HTTP POST request to its server with the data submitted by the respondent. We can use Golang’s standard library to send HTTP requests and receive their responses.
Here’s an example code that simulates a form submission and prints the answers of a Google Form:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"net/http"
"net/url"
"strings"
)
func main() {
// Replace this with your Google Form's ID
formID := "1FAIpQLSeNjWRg8KYq1hg7qu_OCPVdX1GgRcf5DxJGyq3q5rCYn-kymQ"
// Create a new HTTP client
client := http.Client{}
// Prepare the form data to submit
formData := url.Values{}
formData.Set("entry.1553435591", "John Doe") // Replace this with your form field's name and value
formData.Set("entry.1430720384", "20") // Replace this with your form field's name and value
// Add more form fields as needed
// Prepare the HTTP request
req, err := http.NewRequest("POST", fmt.Sprintf("https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/%s/formResponse", formID), strings.NewReader(formData.Encode()))
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
req.Header.Add("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
req.Header.Add("Referer", fmt.Sprintf("https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/%s/viewform", formID))
req.Header.Add("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3")
// Send the HTTP request and get the response
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
// Read the response body and print the answers
body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
for _, line := range strings.Split(string(body), "
") {
if strings.Contains(line, "Your response has been recorded.") {
fmt.Println("Answers submitted successfully!")
break
}
if strings.Contains(line, "entry.") {
fmt.Println(line)
}
}
}
In this code, we first define the Google Form’s ID, which we replace with our own Google Form’s ID. Then, we create a new HTTP client to send requests and receive responses from the Google Form’s server.
Next, we prepare the form data to submit, which consists of name-value pairs representing the answers to each form field. We can get the names of the form fields by inspecting the Google Form’s HTML code with Inspect Element. In our example, we replace the names and values of two form fields, “entry.1553435591” and “entry.1430720384”, with “John Doe” and “20”, respectively.
After preparing the form data, we create an HTTP POST request with the form data encoded in the request body. We also set some headers in the request, such as the content type, referrer, and user agent, to mimic a web browser. We send the HTTP request and get the response, which we read as a string and split by lines.
Finally, we loop through the lines of the response and print the answers of the Google Form’s form fields. We skip the lines that do not contain the form field names and values, and we stop at the line that indicates the form submission was successful.
You can add more form fields and change their names and values as needed to extract the answers of your Google Form.
Conclusion
In this article, we have covered how to use Inspect Element and Golang to extract the answers of a Google Form programmatically. We have explained the steps involved in inspecting the Google Form’s HTML, preparing the form data, and sending an HTTP POST request to the server, as well as provided a code example. With this approach, you can automate the extraction of Google Forms data and analyze it further using Golang or other programming languages and data analysis tools.
Certainly, I'd be happy to expand on the previously covered topics.
- Inspect Element: Inspect Element is a powerful tool that developers use to debug, analyze, and test websites and web applications. With Inspect Element, you can view the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of a web page and modify its components. Some common use cases of Inspect Element include:
- Debugging CSS issues: If you notice that a website's layout is not behaving as expected, you can use Inspect Element to pinpoint the element causing the issue and modify its CSS properties.
- Testing responsive designs: With Inspect Element, you can simulate different screen sizes and resolutions and test how a website responds to them.
- Viewing dynamic web content: Inspect Element can show you the dynamic content generated by JavaScript scripts, which you may not see if you simply load the webpage.
- Golang: Golang, or Go, is a programming language developed by Google in 2007. It is designed to be fast, efficient, and easy to learn, and it is often used for building web applications, network tools, and server software. Some key features of Golang include:
- Concurrency: Golang has built-in support for concurrency, allowing you to execute multiple tasks concurrently without using threads. This makes it easy to write fast and efficient code for high-scale applications.
- Garbage collection: Golang has automatic garbage collection, which eliminates the need for manual memory management. This makes it easier to write safe and bug-free code, as memory leaks are less likely to occur.
- Cross-platform: Golang applications can run on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile devices.
- Google Forms: Google Forms is a web-based application provided by Google that allows users to create custom online forms. It is often used for conducting surveys, collecting feedback, and creating quizzes. Some features of Google Forms include:
- Customizable form fields: Google Forms provides a variety of form fields, including multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, checkboxes, and more. You can customize the formatting and styling of each field.
- Collaboration: Google Forms allows multiple users to collaborate on a form, making it a great tool for team projects or group assignments.
- Data analysis: Google Forms provides data analysis features, such as automatic charts and graphs, allowing you to analyze and visualize the data collected from the form submissions.
In summary, Inspect Element, Golang, and Google Forms are all useful tools for web development and data analysis. By understanding how to use them effectively, you can build powerful web applications and extract valuable insights from your data.
Popular questions
- What is Inspect Element?
Answer: Inspect Element is a debugging and development tool included in most web browsers, allowing developers to check the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of web pages.
- What is Golang used for?
Answer: Golang, or Go, is a programming language developed by Google that is often used for building web applications, network tools, and server software.
- What are some common use cases of Google Forms?
Answer: Google Forms is often used for conducting surveys, collecting feedback, and creating quizzes, among other purposes.
- How can Inspect Element be used to extract data from a Google Form?
Answer: Inspect Element can be used to inspect the HTML DOM tree of a Google Form and identify the form fields and their names. Golang code can then be used to send an HTTP POST request to simulate a form submission and extract the data from the response.
- What are some advantages of using Golang?
Answer: Golang has built-in support for concurrency, automatic garbage collection, and cross-platform compatibility, making it a fast, efficient, and easy-to-learn language for building web applications and server software.
Tag
"Code-Answers"
