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Here’s the problem we are trying to solve:

We are currently using Notion Web Clipper to populate a database with online articles. Part of what Notion Web Clipper does is it populates a URL along with the plain text of the article within the Notion page. What we would like to do is take the page content - not the properties, and either a.) export automatically to Markdown format or b.) send the page content into another more malleable piece of software like google docs for example.

So the question is why is this not a native option in Zapier to take that page data? 

I’ve looked into the API and it wants us to make a call per block, which is extremely heavy and defeats the purpose of simplicity.

Any ideas on how we can extract the content from a Notion page or other ideas to scrape website content into a Notion database or other database that we can leverage? 

 

Hi Smile, 

Thank you for sharing your use case with us. It's great to hear you use Notion Web Clipper to populate a database with online articles. Please tell us what kind of online database you are using so we can provide you with alternative options to populate the URL along with the plain text within the Notion page.

 

Please feel free to share more details. Our community is here to help you find solutions to your automation needs.

We’re using a Notion database - the web clipper sends directly into a Notion database. We could adjust this to a Zap Table or something if it could work, but the same problem still exists.

Hi there @Smile 👋

Perhaps you could use Notion’s Retrieve block children endpoint? I had a quick look and it sounds like it might be able to retrieve multiple block objects contained within the content section of a database item/page in Notion. See: https://developers.notion.com/reference/get-block-children

Alternatively, maybe you could extract the content using a web parsing/scraping tool. Something like Web Parser by Zapier, Browse AI or Wachete perhaps? 

Hopefully that helps. Please do keep us updated on how you get on with this, happy to assist further if you get stuck at all! 

Hi @Smile!

Just following up here to share that I did some testing with that Retrieve block children endpoint with a API Request action and was indeed able to use it to get the page content (blocks). However, it also required a Code by Zapier action to extract the desired content from all the information that was returned for each block object. 

Not sure if you’ve already got an alternative workaround in place, but here’s a guide I’ve written on how to implement that workaround in case you’re interested in giving it a try:


If you do try that out and run into any trouble or have any questions at all please let me know! 🙂

This is super cool @SamB! Definitely a great workaround, a little more complex than I was hoping lol, but thank you so much for taking the time!

I have been playing with the Web Parser by Zapier to see if we can get the info we need and that has given mixed results. Hoping that Zapier can add the Notion page ‘Action’ as a native feature in the future.

You are most welcome @Smile! 🤗

Sorry to hear that Web Parser isn’t working as well as hoped. If it helps there’s example code included in that guide I shared which you can just copy and paste into the Code step to help to make it a bit less complex. I do hope the team are able to build a solution for the Notion app in the near future, so that the page content can be automatically brought over from Notion without the need for any workarounds! 🤞 

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