Website Scrapper?

[hahaitsdrew]

Hey guys how is it going? Drew here, new to the community, and so as with programming. I really am interested with delving more into this thing. I find it fun.

I was just wondering if it's doable to make a program that can access a website's API(if that's the real term for that), like a scrapper.

To be specific, i wanted to make a program that can access on Amazon's site, that will allow me to view a certain item's info, price, description and such. And if ever, just if ever, you can also add a feature like whenever there's a change on a price of an item on Amazon, you'll get to be notified.

I look forward to your response.

Btw, can you guys let me know a good online course to read to for newbies. Thanks heaps!

Drew

 

[IanRyder]

Hi and welcome to the Forum,

There are a few ways to "scrape" web pages. One option is to use the WebBowser Class to navigate to a Web page and then interrogate that HTML Document to retrieve whatever information you are trying to get. Have a look here:-

WebBrowser Class (System.Windows.Forms)

Another option that I see people using quite a lot is the DownloadString Method of the WebClient class. Once that string has been downloaded, which represents the entire HTML of the web page, you can then use the RegEx Class to interrogate the string and get whatever information you need. Have a look here:-

WebClient.DownloadString Method (Uri) (System.Net)
Regex Class (System.Text.RegularExpressions)

That said, both of these options require quite a bit of learning before you can achieve what you want to do. Have a look here for one option of learning:-

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET tutorials for Beginners

To answer your last question, I do not know of any utility that will actually Notify you if a price has changed on Amazon. Maybe that's a question that you need to ask them?

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Ian

 

[hahaitsdrew]

Thanks alot Ian, appreciate it brotha!