I’m looking for someone to scrape a page that contains prices. It’s just a basic HTML page, it doesn’t require anything too complicated to scrape.
File 1: prices.txt
The format of prices.txt will look like this:
“Title 1″;”600”
“Title 2″;”300”
“Title 3″;”1000”
File 2: prices.php
When prices.php is run from a cron job, it will go to the URL (website page) that is to be scraped.
The page contains prices that look like this:
Title 1 – $200 + $99
Title 2 – $300 + $400
etc, etc.
The script will need to compare the prices on the website, to what is in prices.txt
For example, Title 1 is $200 + $99, or $299. The script sees that Title 1 in prices.txt is specified as 600. Since $299 is less than $600, it will send me an e-mail. If the price were over 600, it would not send me an e-mail.
The e-mail to be sent is just a basic one, that contains the title, and the price found.
Other features:
– The script should also send an e-mail if it finds a title on the website that is not found in prices.txt
– When an e-mail regarding a cheap price has been sent, the script should note that it has sent an e-mail, and what price it found. The next time the script is executed from the cron, it should not send another e-mail unless the price has changed. This is just to prevent the script from sending e-mails over and over about the same price.
*Important* – I would also like this script to avoid using a MySQL database.
I have PHP5.x on the server to run the script.
There’s also potential for similar jobs after this one if it all works out! Just give me a shout if you have any questions.
