Looking for help creating a grocery list from a website

My wife and I regularly cook meals using the recipes on https://minimalistbaker.com. Unfortunately, this website has a large number of ads and giant pictures that get in the way, when all we want are the ingredients list when we are putting together our shopping list.

My goal: create a share sheet shortcut that would allow me to:

  • Add the Ingredients from the website to our shared Grocery Reminders list (which syncs with the app, groceries–discussed on the most recent episode of App Stories ).
  • Create a note that has the name of the recipe, and a link to the website or the “Instructions” section of the website in the note.

I’ve look at this discussion of how to create a note from a website by selecting. But, I’m hoping not to have to select the ingredients section, but instead use the <li> section of the html to create a list that each member gets added to the Reminder list.

I’ve spent an hour during lunch trying to get this done… to no avail. Is this possible? Does anyone know of a similar shortcut (or scriptable script) that can provide me some example/guidance?

This is not the solution you asked for but I use Paprika Recipe Manager 3 - this has a scraper for recipes from many websites, and then you can add several recipes to your shopping list.

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Thanks, Rosemary. I have looked at Paprika before, but didn’t realize it had a scraper. This is probably going to turn into one of those projects where the easy, fast, and accurate solution is to pay for a well-designed app, but I’ll end up spending 20 hours digging into something that won’t save me much time. At least it will be fun!

I did look at grabbing the HTML from the page via shortcuts this morning and unfortunately there’s not a single <li there in the recipe I tested. They seem to be using some kind of WordPress plugin which means it should be a relatively standard format though.

That’s what I found too. Still getting up to speed on how to employ some of the more advanced and scripting features of shortcuts/scriptable. I’ll post if I find anything more. Thanks again.

Just tested that site in Paprika and it is fully supported. No need to reinvent the wheel IMHO.

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There is some JSON on the page, which is really easy to parse in Shortcuts! :slight_smile:

If I understand your question correctly, this shortcut should do everything you want:

  1. Add all the ingredients to a list in Reminders (asked on initial setup of the Shortcut)
    1b. Adds a note for every ingredient mentioning for which recipe it is. You can skip this of course
  2. Create a note with the name of the recipe and the URL

This needs to be run from the share sheet on a web page, because it uses the JavaScript action from Shortcuts.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e5162583c2354513bdd95ec4e24fe428

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Thanks, Martijn! This is exactly what I was looking for! And thanks everyone for the help.

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+1 on paprika.
even if it doesn’t scrape properly it’s very easy to create a recipe with the bouilt in browser. jast mark text and click to tell it what type of info it is…

https://www.paprikaapp.com/help/ios/#clipboardtools