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programming:python:clcheck [2010/06/29 15:52] jayprogramming:python:clcheck [2011/03/29 20:15] (current) – [What is it?] jay
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 ====== Craigslist Search and Notify Script ====== ====== Craigslist Search and Notify Script ======
 +===== NO LONGER MAINTAINED =====
 +Sorry to anyone who has arrived here, but I'm no longer maintaining this script.  I remembered, when initially writing it, what a pain in the ass it was to try and maintain a screen scraping app.  Scraping Craigslist, I've found, is especially masochistic since the site seems to sometimes vary slightly between cities on top of the fact that once they change the underlying HTML (which is pretty awful to start with), it breaks everything.
 +
 +It's not the most complicated of scripts, so anyone with some Python chops should be able to still take the base and do some tweaking (mainly of the regular expressions) and get this to work.  I just don't have the large amount of time to sink into supporting something that is broken by the whims of others.  If, in the future, Craigslist publishes a real API of some sort, I will be happy as a clam to rewrite this app using that.  Bottom line here: screen scraping sucks for anyone doing it. 
 +
 ===== What is it? ===== ===== What is it? =====
 A friend of mine asked me recently if I knew of a script that would perform a search on [[http://craigslist.org|craigslist.org]] and send him an email when there were new results to his search.  He's always looking for oddball stuff and by the time //he// finds it on craigslist and emails/calls the person, the item is already gone. A friend of mine asked me recently if I knew of a script that would perform a search on [[http://craigslist.org|craigslist.org]] and send him an email when there were new results to his search.  He's always looking for oddball stuff and by the time //he// finds it on craigslist and emails/calls the person, the item is already gone.
programming/python/clcheck.txt · Last modified: 2011/03/29 20:15 by jay