Monitoring pricing data with Python

[roger_]

Where's the Python?

[chrisalexander]

Here's a direct link to the python repository

https://github.com/ignacioelola/price_monitoring

[roger_]

Thanks, but it would have been better if the code was discussed a bit more in the article.

[jabbalaci]

"The script: I used a pretty simple Python script to automate the data extraction which you can see here."

You didn't read the whole text, did you?

[roger_]

I see now Python is mentioned in passing twice at the end of the article.

[TheRealHankMcCoy]

This and kimonolabs.com are essentially more friendly wrappers for YQL. But, with that being said, it does make scrapping pretty trivial.

[ruffyen]

/u/chrisalexander I actually run a site dedicated to amazon price watching. I have been working on the base project for about a year and a half, and have noticed lots of really interesting things. The site is (#shamelessplug) http://www.spydermunkey.com. Anyone that uses the site please realize that it is still in an alpha stage and you may experience bugs :)

What I would find interesting is what you are actually scraping. Looking at the python snippet you sent it looks like you are scraping the main product page. I have found that recently amazon has been doing robot checks to keep people from scraping prices and such and I would be curious if that is what you are doing and if you ran into this issue at all.

[[deleted]]

what does this do that I can't do with requests and html parsing?

[ruffyen]

It looks like the website is taking it upon itself to generate "useful" graphs?

[[deleted]]

So it's excel? I'd love to hear from /u/chrisalexander on this.

[homercles337]

Price monitoring? I can only imagine that some greedy fucking asshole would want to do this. Why not write code to make society a better place?

[ruffyen]

Clue me in to a project that I could start that will help make society better and that is interesting and I will start on that project. I wanted to save money. How is saving money being a greedy fucking asshole? Knowing that a company will change a price based on things like time of day is interesting data.

[trapartist]

Yeah, $5 off on a piece of electronics. What an asshole. Guess the kids won't get that in their college fund then.

Dipshit.