Further Exploration

Now you know how to parse pricing information from a web page—what you do with this information is up to you. If you are so inclined, you can expand your experience with some of the following suggestions.

  • Since the prices in the example store change on a daily basis, monitor the daily price changes for a month and save your parsed results in a database.

  • Develop scripts that graph price fluctuations.

  • Read about sending email with webbots in Chapter 15, and develop scripts that notify you when prices hit preset high or low thresholds.

  • Build a real procurement system that not only monitors products and prices but also make purchases.

While this chapter covers monitoring prices online, you can use similar parsing techniques to monitor ...

Get Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.