Use Google Sheets cell content in script

Wouldn't it be nice to collect data using a Google Sheets Form and be able to get each cell value from a script on your phone or computer? It can be done.

I'm assuming the data you need for your script is already in a Google Sheet. It could be collected using a form or similar. To get unauthenticated access to a Google Sheet it needs to be published. Either publish the sheet containing the data or create a and publish new Google Sheet to hold only the data needed for the script. Import the data to that new sheet using =IMPORTRANGE().

To get the URL for the published sheet, have a look at this page: https://developers.google.com/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_sample. Basically you just need the key for the sheet.

The published sheet URL looks something like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/<key>/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

After some experimentation with various URL formats I got cell A1 using this URL:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/<key>/od6/public/basic/R1C1

Cell C2 would look like this:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/<key>/od6/public/basic/R2C3

OK, on to the content. Below is the content I get when requesting cell R1C1. The actual data is between the tags <content type='text'> and </content>

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:batch='http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batch' xmlns:gs='http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006'><id>https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/<key>/od6/public/basic/R1C1</id><updated>2014-12-12T07:35:19.026Z</updated><category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006' term='http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#cell'/><title type='text'>A1</title><content type='text'>2</content><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/<key>/od6/public/basic/R1C1'/></entry>

We just need to split the content on <content type='text'> and then split the second part again on </content>. The cell data is in the first part of the second split.

PowerShell example:
$CellA1 = Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Uri https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/1DzK0hnq9bexu6h1ryZzPP6-WWk55IEx0xZrtFKK6UZI/od6/public/basic/R1C1
$Value = (($CellA1 -split "<content type=.text.>") -split "</content")[1]

Tasker example:
GetValueFromSheet (4)
A1: HTTP Get [ Server:Port:https://spreadsheets.google.com/ Path:feeds/cells/<key>/od6/public/basic/R1C1 Attributes: Cookies: User Agent: Timeout:10 Mime Type: Output File: Trust Any Certificate:Off ] 
A2: Variable Split [ Name:%HTTPD Splitter:<content type='text'> Delete Base:On ] 
A3: Variable Split [ Name:%HTTPD2 Splitter:</content> Delete Base:On ] 
A4: Variable Set [ Name:%Value To:%HTTPD21 Do Maths:Off Append:Off ] 

The content of A1 in the Google Sheet is now in Tasker variable %Value.

You could use this to trigger other Tasker tasks or to present that value on a Zooper Widget, or send it to Pushover. I use it for a few things, and might write a more detailed end-to-end post on that.