Seeking permission to scrape API documentation for open-source use.

[elliottsancrant]

Hey everyone, I originally asked this in a support chat but they forwarded me to here so I will just copy paste my question. Thank you!

I am a 19 year old trying to build my machine learning programming portfolio for job recruitment and I am wanting to develop a software that will assist Fusion 360 users who want to create their own add-ins/scripts regardless of their programming level. The way I am planning on doing this is by creating a CSV file containing all of the objects/enums in the fusion 360 API documentation and their corresponding descriptions/use cases. Once I have created this CSV file I will then either create my own algorithm or use a preexisting API such as Openai or Google generative that will have access to said CSV file and will assist users in creating their own scripts/add-ins for fusion 360. A use case example of this could be a user saying to the AI "I want to create a script that automatically converts any projected (purple) lines to construction lines upon projection" and then the AI would respond by providing the objects/enums that would fit this script, and how to use them. I would not charge anyone to use this nor would I generate any money off of it, I only want to put it in my github portfolio to stand out to job recruiters. The reason for me bringing this up is that scraping data from the autodesk website is against the TOS unless you recieve permission so I wanted to do the right thing and ask for permission prior to beggining this project. I would only be scraping the objects/enums under the Fusion 360 api documentation section of the site. I would really love to pursue this project as Fusion 360 is my favorite hobby and I spend pretty much every hour of my free time either working on my own projects or helping people with theirs in the community. @

[BrianEkins]

You don't need to do any web scraping to get the help content. The help is available as a chm file, which is really a zip file. Change the extension to .zip, and then you can unpack it and have direct access to all of the HTML pages as text files. The Zip processor built into Windows fails to unpack it, but 7-Zip handles it.

It sounds like an interesting project. You'll have to report back how it turns out.