My last post contains an HTML table that is a modified version of the big table on the "Closing the Gap on Autism" page. Here, mainly for my own future reference, is how I generated the modified table. There are probably ways I could have done it smarter or quicker.

• Generate a sorted CSV file
  • Select the table contents in Safari and copy-paste them to a Numbers spreadsheet.
  • Sort on state, city, and ZIP, in that order. I was thrown off by the fact that Numbers doesn't have a menu item with the word "Sort" in it. I learned from the Help documentation that what I wanted was "Reorganize".
  • Format the ZIP column to be five digits, padded on the left with zeros. Otherwise the leading zeros will be omitted when the file is exported.
  • Export to a CSV file.
  • Pipe the CSV file through uniq to remove duplicate entries.
• Convert the CSV to an HTML table
  • This CSV Converter page does the job nicely. I noticed Excel has an option to export directly to HTML, which would have been a nice shortcut except what it generates is horrifying.
• Clean up the HTML
  • Paste the HTML into Sublime Text.
  • Get rid of the spaces that the CSV Converter inserted before many of the closing ">" characters. This wasn't important; I just didn't like looking at the extra spaces.
  • Replace tabs with spaces. I couldn't get find-and-replace to work with tabs, and was too lazy to try harder than I did.
  • Use regex plus global find-and-replace to convert the store numbers into links to the Gap web site. Because there were sometimes two store numbers, I used two find-and-replace passes to generate the store links. I manually cleaned up one case where three store numbers were given.
  • Use another regex find-and-replace to fix phone numbers with spaces in them.
  • Use another find-and-replace to remove the extra spaces from "St ." and "Ave .".
  • Replace "&" with an ampersand.

There are a whole bunch more punctuation fixes I could have made, but I decided not to bother. I allowed myself to fix one typo, and corrected "Loehmen"s" to "Loehman's".

I added a bit of CSS before posting to WordPress. You can tell I'm not a CSS expert — mainly I wanted to draw the borders.