[Tutor] find data in html file

[Andrew P]

It's free now to use the API. You just "self-certify" and get 10,000 calls a
month.

Imac, if you use the API, let me save you some trouble. REST is useless,
SOAP is overly complicated, which leaves XML over HTTP which is really quite
nice. I am not speaking generally, but talking about the ebay
implementatiosn before anybody beats me up :)

Besides, no Python tool I could find would parse that accursed WSDL file,
making SOAP a useless layer over the exact same request as XML over HTTP.

Personally tho, I just scrape what I want, for a variety of reasons. Number
one being when the API breaks, you are screwed. If your scrape breaks, it's
usually 5 minutes to suss out and fix. And breaking happens much, much less
often than you might think. It's a little more initial (monkey) work, since
you don't have a nicely formatted XML file coming back. But the same
principles apply. You need to choose a tool to parse stuctured data.
Elementtree + PDIS Xpath, or BeautifulSoup, either way you are making a tree
and extracting data from it :)

Don't worry if none of this makes sense right now. It's a bit of a learning
curve going down either road, but they are more parallel than not. Sign up
with ebay, get your developer tokens and all that jazz, download elementree
and start making some requests, and parsing what you get back with the tool
of your choice. If that suits your purposes, it is probably the easiest way.

On 9/30/05, paul brian <paul1brian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But to get the data like price,bidders,shipment etc without the official
> > eBayAPI is hard.
> > Maybe anyone has a solution made ?
>
> Ebay specifically change around their HTML codes, tags and formatting
> (in quite a clever way) to stop people doing exactly what you are
> trying to do. I think it changes every month.
>
> Like people say, use the API - You need to become an "ebay developer"
> (signup) and can use your own code or the python-ebay thing for free
> in "the sandbox", but must pay $100 or so to have your code verified
> as "not likey to scrunch our servers" before they give you a key for
> the real world.
>
> Its a bit of a pain, so i just hacked turbo-ebay a while back and made
> do. Worked quite well really.
>
>
> --
> --------------------------
> Paul Brian
> m. 07875 074 534
> t. 0208 352 1741
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