How to sort through a block of string text

Trying to use data from a basketball stats site for a project. I just the need the data to be useable for manipulation (names in one box, correlating stats in the other) as it is right now its just a long list of strings.

const axios = require('axios');
const cheerio = require('cheerio')
const fs = require('fs')
const url = 'https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2023_per_game.html';
    axios(url)
        .then(response => {
            const html = response.data;
            const $ = cheerio.load(html)
            const fullTable = $('.full_table').text()
            console.log(typeof fullTable);
            })
            .catch(console.error);

Tried a couple of different things (i have 2 other versions of this) and either no data is moved/printed out or it simply gives me all of the data as one big block of strings.

It's by design that you're getting a long string when calling text()

const fullTable = $('.full_table').text()

text

> Get the combined text contents of each element in the set of matched elements, including their descendants.

From the docs

While text is useful, it's not what you need. To get the stats, you'll process each tr.full_table element and extract the contents to an object array, which you can easily query. To do this efficiently see the extract method for more information and code examples.

extract

> The extract method in Cheerio allows you to extract data from an HTML document and store it in an object. The method takes a map object as a parameter, where the keys are the names of the properties to be created on the object, and the values are the selectors or descriptors to be used to extract the values.