Program that regulary checks average ebay prices and put it in an excel file or online

[pant90]

Hey I didn't know where to post this and since this is the most popular category I guess here most people will see it


So I would love to have a book or file with all the actual retro videogame prices. So actually I started one manually but it is a pain in the ass since prices change a lot and you can never keep it up to date. That's why I would like to have a programm that takes the name of a game out of an excel file, looks it up in the sold section on Ebay and uses the 5 or so last saless to calculate an average price which it then puts next to the name of the game in the Excel file. So do you programmers think something like that is doable or is there a programm doing this already?


If anything isn't cleared out enough please ask


Hop you can help


pant90

 

[Binky]

Perhaps better suited to off-topic? - unless such a program were developed with the pandora specifically in mind...

 

[kingoddball]

You might be better to try something like Microsoft excel with a fancy macro.

 

[TrashyMG]

It would take some effort, but not that necessarily hard to do. So what you need is a way of getting the results of the ebay search, In PHP and Python I would use a Curl module to handle this. Basically you would use Curl to emulate an ebay search form and then it would return the HTML source code from the resulting search.. You would need to write some code to parse through that raw HTML and pick out the names, prices, links to the auction. etc.. You can output this to a HTML table that looks like a spreadsheet, but I've also used PHP and Python modules that make it easy to generate Microsoft excel files dynamically.


of course you can do all this in any language your familiar with such Perl, Ruby, Javascript, C/C++, Java... etc


Personally, I do a lot of this type of thing at work and don't really have the time or energy to get into a side project like this myself.

 

[chosen]

If using PHP, I can recommend using the DOM scripting library to parse the pages.


Something like this: http://www.ibm.com/d...ldomphp/#N10121


I'm sure Python will also have a DOM scripting lib somewhere


Also, it seems Ebay has an API, might be useful


http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/

 

[TrashyMG]

Also, it seems Ebay has an API, might be useful http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/

Cool I suspected that Ebay had an API,That makes things considerable easier.

 

[Link]

eF EBay. That's all.