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.

  • Daniel Quinn
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    1 year ago

    The project is Open source, so you might be able to leverage it for Canadian data. All you need is:

    • Understanding of the expected format for the project
    • Access to data from Canadian retailers. This can be acquired via APIs (these are usually free) or by scraping their sites.
    • JohnnyCanuck
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      1 year 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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        1 year 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.