Im looking for the actual code or a way to retrieves data from the
ever popular website amazon.com via the microsoft excel program. I am
looking to retrieves general data like, prices, sale ranking,
avalibilty, author name, item title through a simple input of the
International standard book number or ISBN for short in the excel
program. |
Request for Question Clarification by
hedgie-ga
on
03 Aug 2006 21:43 PDT
Hi cultural
The requirement ' using excel ' may be an unnecessary complication.
1) Can you just say 'retrieve data' and let the programmer choose his/her
preffered scripting language and method?
2) Are you aware that companies do limit amount of 'web scraping'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
they allow (unless you have agreement/permission on use of the data)?
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Request for Question Clarification by
sycophant-ga
on
04 Aug 2006 00:52 PDT
Hi,
A better option, as hedgie suggests, might be to retrieve the data
with a dedicated program or script which will process it into a format
that Excel will easily read.
Generating CSV and XLS files is quite simple, so any number of
scripting languages could be used to implement that aspect of it.
Also, as hedgie suggests, many companies frown on web-scraping,
however Amazon does over a developer service that implements API
access to many of their services - http://aws.amazon.com/
I would be unable to provide an Excel script to do as you want (as I
use OpenOffice) however if the idea of a independant script is useful
to you, I could probably provide a PHP script to do what you seek.
Although other researchers could probably provide applications in
other languages also.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Sycophant
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Request for Question Clarification by
tisme-ga
on
08 Aug 2006 10:15 PDT
Hello cultural-ga,
If you really want this done in Excel, please provide me with the
exact information that you wanted included from the standard
Amazon.com page. In addition, I need a general idea of how you want
the output formatted.
I will give it a shot if you give me that information. Please also
take hedgie-ga and sycophant-ga's ideas into consideration. We look
forward to helping you with this!
tisme-ga
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