It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.

  • JohnnyCanuck
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    9 months ago

    At the bottom of the chain on mastodon the creator says they use the search APIs of the store websites. I wouldn’t have expected those to be easily accessible!

    • Daniel Quinn
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      9 months ago

      Yeah a lot of chains even have a documented, developer-friendly API. If that’s not available though, you can usually figure out the API just by looking at the calls your browser makes when visiting a page. Most sites use a REST API for catalog pages that’s then rendered out with JavaScript.

      If that doesn’t work, then you can usually scrape everything with Selenium. It’s a little harder to do, but still quite manageable, though that usually has to be a background job, as it’s slow.