DEV Community: Lawrence Lagerlof

Stop copy-pasting tables from websites: This Firefox and Chrome extension does it better

Lawrence Lagerlof — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:59:03 +0000

How many times have you found yourself manually copying data from a website table, cell by cell, into a spreadsheet or trying to format it for documentation? If you're a developer, researcher, or anyone who works with data, you've definitely been there.

I built Website Table Exporter to solve this exact problem. It's a Firefox extension that automatically detects HTML tables on any website and adds export buttons right where you need them.

The Problem

Whether you're:

📊 Analyzing competitor pricing tables
📝 Documenting API responses in Markdown
🔍 Researching data from academic databases
🧪 Testing with realistic datasets
📈 Building dashboards with real-world data

...you've probably wasted hours manually reformatting table data. Most websites don't provide export functionality, and browser dev tools aren't exactly user-friendly for this.

The Solution

Website Table Exporter automatically adds three export buttons to every HTML table you encounter:

🗂️ CSV Export

Perfect for spreadsheet analysis. Headers are quoted, numeric data stays numeric:

"Product","Price","Stock"
"Laptop",899,15
"Mouse",25,42
"Keyboard",75,28

🔧 JSON Export

Ideal for developers. Maintains proper data types:

[
  {
    "Product": "Laptop",
    "Price": 899,
    "Stock": 15
  },
  {
    "Product": "Mouse", 
    "Price": 25,
    "Stock": 42
  }
]

📝 Markdown Export

Great for documentation and README files:

| Product | Price | Stock |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Laptop | 899 | 15 |
| Mouse | 25 | 42 |
| Keyboard | 75 | 28 |

Smart Features That Actually Matter

🧠 Intelligent Data Type Detection: The extension analyzes each column to determine if it contains numeric data, preserving data types in JSON and avoiding unnecessary quotes in CSV.

⚡ Dynamic Table Support: Works with JavaScript-generated tables and SPAs. The extension uses a MutationObserver to detect tables added after page load.

🎛️ Toggle Control: Hide/show buttons across all pages with the popup. Perfect when you need a clean view.

⚠️ Merged Cell Warnings: Alerts you when tables contain merged cells that might affect export quality.

🔒 Privacy-First: Only requires activeTab and clipboardWrite permissions. No data collection, everything stays local.

Installation

Chrome: Install from source on GitHub project page.
Firefox: Install from Mozilla Addons website.

AIpim: Ask, copy, done.

Lawrence Lagerlof — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:24:21 +0000

🚀 What is AIpim?

AIpim is a minimalist desktop app for super fast OpenAI API responses - no browser, no fluff. Just prompt, copy, done.

⚡ Quick Start

Clone & install:

   git clone https://github.com/llagerlof/aipim.git
   cd aipim
   npm install

Run the app:

npm start (any system), ./start.sh (Linux) or start.bat (Windows) - bind it to a hotkey like Ctrl+Shift+F11

Configure:

Go to File → Configuration
Add your OpenAI API key
Choose a model (we recommend gpt‑4.1‑nano)
Save

🎯 Instant Usage

Trigger the app (shortcut or CLI)
Type/paste prompt
Press Ctrl+Enter
Hit Enter twice → answer copied & program closed
Or press Esc to dismiss the app

✨ Why Use It?

Zero context switching - keyboard-only flow.
Speed - direct API, no UI overhead.
Simple - no chat history, no distractions.
Open-source & MIT-licensed-hack away

🖥️ Project page

https://github.com/llagerlof/aipim

🚀 Try AIpim Today

Get instant AI replies with a few keystrokes. Happy prompt & copy!

Zombie Infection Simulator

Lawrence Lagerlof — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 04:48:03 +0000

https://llagerlof.github.io/games/simzombie

Chrome Extension Boilerplate with Popup Interaction (Manifest V3)

Lawrence Lagerlof — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 19:20:18 +0000

The goal

This boilerplate extension provides developers with a starting point for creating their own Chrome extensions using Manifest V3.

What's new

The biggest improvement in this version is the addition of a popup interface. Now, when users click the extension button in the browser's top bar, they're presented with an interactive popup instead of just logging a message to the console.

Features

This boilerplate demonstrates three key extension behaviors:

Before page load: Print a message to DevTools console before the page loads.
After page load: Print a message to DevTools console before the page loads.
Popup interaction: Displays a popup when the user clicks the extension button, allowing for more complex user interactions.

The extension now provides a button within the popup that, when clicked, injects a script into the active tab to modify the DOM and log a message to the console.

Installation

Clone or download the files from github.com/llagerlof/fresh-chrome-extension and place them in a directory.
Open your browser's extension page: chrome://extensions
Enable "Developer mode" in the top right corner.
Click Load Unpacked and select the extension directory.

How to test it

Open any website.
Click the extension button on the browser's top bar. You'll see a popup with a button.
Click the button in the popup labeled "Click this button to add an orange div to the page".
Observe the following changes:
- An orange div appears at the top of the page with the message "DOM modified!"
- Open the developer tools (F12) and look at the console. You'll see the message "Action executed from popup!"

This boilerplate provides a solid foundation for building more complex Chrome extensions. Feel free to modify and extend it to suit your specific needs.

Happy coding!

crtlr.sh - CTRL+r on steroids

Lawrence Lagerlof — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:32:58 +0000

This project is available on GitHub at http://github.com/llagerlof/ctrlr

Usage

Once the script is installed, use the CTRL+r shortcut in the terminal as you normally would to find past commands. You can use the arrow keys or you can type to search. Find the command you want to execute and press ENTER. The selected command will be inserted into the prompt (but not executed). If you want to execute it you should press ENTER again.

Beyond that the selected command will be copied to the clipboard, ready to be pasted anywhere (try CTRL+SHIFT+V in another application).

Installation

Install fzf
Install xclip or xsel
Copy the ctrlr.sh file to /usr/local/bin/
Make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ctrlr.sh

Override the vanilla CTRL+r adding the following line to the end of your ~/.bashrc:

bind -x '"\C-r": "source /usr/local/bin/ctrlr.sh"'

Restart the terminal

Autoleap - automatically leap into any previously visited directory

Lawrence Lagerlof — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 20:18:00 +0000

This script adds an amazing feature to the cd command. It records (locally) the path of all directories you visit using cd. When you want to access a previously visited directory, you just need to run cd part_of_directory_name

The script is very lightweight and fast. The image below shows how simple it is to use:

You can leap into any directory that exists in the history file, from anywhere.

Installation

Access the GitHub project page.
Download the script autoleap.sh anywhere.
source the script on your .bashrc (add the line source /path/to/script/autoleap.sh to the end of your .bashrc)
Reopen the terminal (or source .bashrc)
Be happy.

Navigator, a fine-tuned tool to quick directory access and navigation

Lawrence Lagerlof — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 16:14:48 +0000

This tiny tool that relies on the shoulder of giants has one single goal: to allow the user to navigate between directories faster than other tools, even cd in most cases.

I focused on UX to make it easy and useful. Look these nice features:

The last created directories are near the focused cursor for quick access.
Always focus on directory ".." when changing directory to allow quick exit to the parent directory.
Files are listed separated from directories.
Files can be opened with the associated application.
The path of last directory or file accessed is copied to the clipboard.
Fuzzy search.

How to install

1) Install the following dependencies using your distro's package manager:

fzf
xclip
xgd-open (from package xdg-utils)

2) Download the script navigator from https://github.com/llagerlof/navigator

3) Copy the script to /usr/local/bin/

4) Make it executable with chmod +x /usr/local/bin/navigator

5) Create an alias in your ~/.bashrc. Add the following line to the end of file:

alias n="source /usr/local/bin/navigator"

6) Reopen the shell to reload the aliases.

How to use

Run the script typing n in bash.
Navigate with arrow keys.
Press ENTER key to access a directory.
Press ENTER key to open a file with the associated application.
Press ESC key to exit the script. Your new current directory is the last directory visited while using Navigator.
Start typing to fuzzy search the current list of directories and files.

mariabak: Making MariaDB and MySQL backups a breeze

Lawrence Lagerlof — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 15:18:31 +0000

About

mariabak is a opensource command-line program frontend for mysqldump to make MariaDB and MySQL databases backups. Some operations are easier using mariabak than using mysqldump directly.

Project page

https://github.com/llagerlof/mariabak

Let's see some of the goodies:

You can opt-out dump data from specific tables. The good news: the tables structure will be preserved (mysqldump doesn't have this as a native option so you need to execute more than one command to do this).
You can perform backup of all databases at once, or just some chosen databases, creating one dump file for each database (mysqldump put all databases into one single dump file).
One directory with a timestamp will be created for each mariabak execution (more than one file is generated for each backup, so let's keep things organized).
It backups all the user grants, system variables and events to separate files.

Hands-on

Usage examples

List databases:

$ mariabak -list     # default localhost, user root, empty password

Backup all databases. A directory will be created in current directory:

$ mariabak --databases=*

Backup one database, asking for the server password interactively:

$ mariabak --databases=db1 --host=localhost --user=root -p

Backup some databases, ignore some tables data but preserve its structure:

$ mariabak --databases=db1,db2,db3 --ignore-tables=db2.table1,db2.table2,db3.table_a --user=root -p

Backup one database, passing the server password inline:

$ mariabak --databases=db1 --host=localhost --user=root --port=3306 --password=hunter2  # Caution with this one. The shell can save command history.

Chrome Extension boilerplate (Manifest V3)

Lawrence Lagerlof — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:13:35 +0000

The goal

This boilerplate extension can be used for devs as a starting point for creating your own extensions.

Features

Once installed it observes the 3 most common events: Before the page load, after page load, and clicking the extension button on the browser top bar.

For each event it writes a message on DevTools console (press F12 to see it).

The manifest is configured to work on every https and http page, but is up to you to define your own.

Installation

Get the files from github.com/llagerlof/fresh-chrome-extension and put them inside some directory.
Open the browser extension page: chrome://extensions
Check the developer mode on top right.
Click Load Unpacked and select the extension directory.

How to test it

Open any website.
Open developer tools and look at the console. You will see 2 messages. One message was written before page load, the other was written after page load.
Click the extension button on browser top bar and watch the console. A third message will be written (don't forget that new extensions are hidden inside the Chrome "puzzle" button, on top right).

Have fun.

Freezer, a tool to help devs discover which records are created when some action is performed on any application that uses MySQL

Lawrence Lagerlof — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 11:33:35 +0000

The goal

The purpose of this tool is to shorten the learning curve necessary to understand the relationships between tables of any MySQL database.

How it works?

You are a developer, and sometimes you need to understand third-party applications, either to generate a report or to create a new feature. In theory would be enough to look at relationships, but real life applications tend to create several records in several tables that aren't always clear for the programmer just looking at the structure, and sometimes requiring a lot of research to understand what "that" button does in database. That's where the Freezer comes in.

Suppose you want to quickly know which tables receives new records, as well as what those records are, when you perform any action in any application installed in your computer (for development purposes). It's very easy:

1. With the Freezer application you click on the Freeze button.
2. With the other application you perform one or more operations.
3. Back on the Freezer you click on the What is New button.

Freezer will show you which records were inserted in all database's tables between the Freeze and What is New commands, and that is an excellent starting point to focus your attention to whatever feature you need to develop for that application, or data you need to extract from that database.

Use case

In this example I want to know which records are inserted in Moodle's database when an assignment is created.

I chose Moodle for this demo specifically because the complexity of its database, but you can connect to any MySQL database.

The project

It's open source, easy to install and use. Just put it in your local web server, configure one or more databases and you are good to go.

llagerlof / freezer

Freezer is a tool to help developers to discover which database's records are inserted by other programs.

Freezer

Freezer is a tool to help developers discover which database records are created by some application's action and which tables received these new records because that action.

It makes much easier to spot these tables and its new records, understand how the third-party application interacts with the database and also how relationships are made.

Latest version

0.16.2

Currently only MySQL/MariaDB is supported.

Objective

The goal of this tool is to shorten the time that developers need to understand the structure of a given database identifying in which tables the third-party application, like Moodle, HumHub or Elgg for instance, inserts new records depending on the action the application performed, so the developer can focus directly on the tables that primarily matter for that specific action.

Or maybe you just want to quickly know which tables are affected by some application's action.

Freezer can connect to any MySQL/MariaDB database, not…

View on GitHub

MoodleRest, a PHP class to query Moodle REST webservices

Lawrence Lagerlof — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 14:33:01 +0000

What it does, exactly?

MoodleRest allow you to easily make GET or POST requests to query or update information from many webservices available on Moodle.

"Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments".

This lib can return information from Moodle webservices in one of these formats:

array
json
xml

The GitHub project page

https://github.com/llagerlof/MoodleRest

This dev.to article covers the basics. Many more examples and other features on project page.

Requirements

Ensure you already have access to a Moodle webservice. To use this class you will need a token (generated by Moodle admin) with the necessary capabilities for the services you want to access.

To the code

You have 2 options to add this lib to your project:

Option One

Use Composer to include it in your project.

Inside your project directory create or modify the file composer.json:

{
    "require": {
        "llagerlof/moodlerest": "2.3.0"
    }
}

In the same directory of the composer.json, run:

$ composer install

In your project, load the lib using composer autoloader:

<?php
require_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Option Two

Just include the MoodleRest.php class directly in your script.

require_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/MoodleRest.php';

The `MoodleRest` constructor

You can pass 2 parameters:

A full url path to the Moodle webserver
The token generated by Moodle admin.

Example:

$MoodleRest = new MoodleRest(
    'http://127.0.0.1/moodle/webservice/rest/server.php', 
    '8f12e614dae30735260a045313caa400'
);

The method `request()`

This method needs at least 2 parameters:

The webservice functiona name (string).
The parameters (array) passed to the webservice. The MoodleRest will internally convert this array to a query string. If you need to learn how to build an array compatible to each webservice's function I have you covered!

Query example (GET)

Query 2 Moodle groups with IDs 1 and 2, passing the server URL and token in constructor using the request method.

$MoodleRest = new MoodleRest(
    'http://127.0.0.1/moodle/webservice/rest/server.php', 
    '8f12e614dae30735260a045313caa400'
);

$groups = $MoodleRest->request(
    'core_group_get_groups', 
    array('groupids' => array(1,2))
);

print_r($groups);

Inserting data example (POST)

Set the server and token in constructor and make a request to create a group on Moodle.

$MoodleRest = new MoodleRest(
    'http://127.0.0.1/moodle/webservice/rest/server.php', 
    '8f12e614dae30735260a045313caa400'
);

$new_group = array(
    'groups' => array(
        array(
            'courseid' => 2, 
            'name' => 'Group name', 
            'description' => 'Group description'
        )
    )
);

/*
The default request's METHOD is to make a GET request, but you can change it to POST.
This is recommended when inserting and updating data.
*/

$return = $MoodleRest->request(
    'core_group_create_groups', 
    $new_group, 
    MoodleRest::METHOD_POST
);

// If you want the requested URL
echo $MoodleRest->getUrl();

That's it! Quick and easy.

More features and examples on project page.

QuickAuthPHP – One script for web authentication. Multi-user. No database required.

Lawrence Lagerlof — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:11:19 +0000

Goal

Sometimes you have a small web application that you want to keep private, but don't have time to implement a proper database authentication system, nor .htaccess is suitable for your needs (or you hate native browser authentication, like me). If this is true for you, QuickAuthPHP is a super fast solution.

Project website

github.com/llagerlof/QuickAuthPHP

What it does?

Add a single login form to any webpage on your server.
You can have multiple logins and passwords.

Goodies

One single script easy to configure and install.
Non obstrusive. You only need to require_once() the script in your web pages.
No dependencies.
No need to change HTML, Javascript or CSS in your pages.
Secure.

What will you need?

A working web server with PHP 5.5 or above (preferably 7.x).
The file auth.php.

DEV Community: Lawrence Lagerlof

Stop copy-pasting tables from websites: This Firefox and Chrome extension does it better

The Problem

The Solution

🗂️ CSV Export

🔧 JSON Export

📝 Markdown Export

Smart Features That Actually Matter

Installation

AIpim: Ask, copy, done.

🚀 What is AIpim?

⚡ Quick Start

🎯 Instant Usage

✨ Why Use It?

🖥️ Project page

🚀 Try AIpim Today

Zombie Infection Simulator

Chrome Extension Boilerplate with Popup Interaction (Manifest V3)

The goal

What's new

Features

Installation

How to test it

crtlr.sh - CTRL+r on steroids

Usage

Installation

Autoleap - automatically leap into any previously visited directory

Installation

Navigator, a fine-tuned tool to quick directory access and navigation

How to install

How to use

mariabak: Making MariaDB and MySQL backups a breeze

About

Project page

Hands-on

Usage examples

Chrome Extension boilerplate (Manifest V3)

The goal

Features

Installation

How to test it

Freezer, a tool to help devs discover which records are created when some action is performed on any application that uses MySQL

The goal

How it works?

Use case

The project

llagerlof / freezer

Freezer is a tool to help developers to discover which database's records are inserted by other programs.

Freezer

Latest version

Objective

MoodleRest, a PHP class to query Moodle REST webservices

What it does, exactly?

The GitHub project page

Requirements

To the code

Option One

Option Two

The MoodleRest constructor

The method request()

Query example (GET)

Inserting data example (POST)

QuickAuthPHP – One script for web authentication. Multi-user. No database required.

Goal

Project website

What it does?

Goodies

What will you need?

The `MoodleRest` constructor

The method `request()`