Question

An analyst needs to collect quarterly interest rate data that a government agency publishes only as an HTML table on a public web page. The agency provides no API, no downloadable file, and no database access. Which acquisition method is most appropriate to obtain this data into a structured format for analysis?

Accepted Answer

Web scraping the page to parse the HTML table into rows and columns

Answer

Requesting a REST API endpoint from the agency's public documentation

Answer

Establishing an ODBC connection directly to the agency's database

Answer

Downloading the published dataset as a flat CSV file from the site