"Ycombinator_news_{{new Date().toISOString().split('T', 1)[0]}}.{{$parameter[\"fileFormat\"]}}"

n8n Workflow: Parse Y Combinator News Page

This n8n workflow demonstrates how to fetch, parse, and process content from a web page. It's currently configured to perform a web request and then send an email, but it's missing the actual parsing logic.

What it does

This workflow, as defined, performs the following steps:

1. Starts the workflow: The workflow is manually triggered.
2. Makes an HTTP Request: It initiates an HTTP GET request to an unspecified URL. This is intended to fetch the content of a web page.
3. Sends an Email: After the HTTP request, it sends an email. The content of this email is not specified in the provided JSON, but it would likely contain information derived from the web request.

Prerequisites/Requirements

To use this workflow, you will need:

• An n8n instance.
• An SMTP (Email Send) credential configured in n8n for sending emails.

Setup/Usage

1. Import the workflow: Import the provided JSON into your n8n instance.
2. Configure the HTTP Request node:
   • Open the "HTTP Request" node.
   • Set the URL parameter to the target web page you wish to parse (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com).
   • (Optional) Configure any other HTTP request options as needed (headers, authentication, etc.).
3. Configure the Send Email node:
   • Open the "Send Email" node.
   • Select your pre-configured SMTP credential.
   • Specify the From Email, To Email, Subject, and Body of the email. You can use expressions to include data from previous nodes (e.g., the output of the HTTP Request).
4. Add Parsing Logic (Recommended):
   • Currently, the workflow directly sends an email after the HTTP request without extracting specific data from the HTML.
   • To make this workflow useful for parsing a news page (like Y Combinator), you would typically insert an HTML Extract node (or a Code node for custom parsing) between the "HTTP Request" and "Send Email" nodes. This node would use CSS selectors or XPath to extract titles, links, and other relevant information from the fetched HTML.
   • You might also want to use an Item Lists node to manipulate the extracted data (e.g., sort, filter, or limit items).
   • A Merge node could be used if you were fetching data from multiple sources and wanted to combine them.
   • A Spreadsheet File node could be used to convert parsed data into a CSV or Excel file if you wanted to attach it to the email or save it elsewhere.
5. Activate the workflow: Once configured, activate the workflow to enable it.
6. Execute the workflow: You can manually execute the workflow by clicking the "Execute Workflow" button in the n8n editor. For automated execution, you would typically add a trigger node (e.g., a Cron node for scheduled runs) to the beginning of the workflow.