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Hack 100 Working Without the eBay API

Programming eBay outside the confines of the
eBay API.

Consider
the API to be a gift from the gods at eBay. At least in theory, the
existence of the API puts an end to the need for scrapers, parsers,
and other kludges.

For example, the script in [Hack #24]
retrieves auction information by parsing the title of the auction
page. While this works most of the time, it is susceptible to failure
from even the smallest changes. Now, consider the alternative script
in [Hack #86], which accomplishes the
same task with more robust API calls. The API version will continue
to work even if eBay dramatically changes the formatting of their
auction pages (which, in fact, they did on July 7, 2003).

But the API comes at a cost. Quite a bit of setup is required (not to
mention certification) before you can use the API, and it often ends
up being somewhat slower than some simple parsers.

So here are some extra, non-API tools you can use to supplement (or
take the place of) your API-based code.

Note that all of these come with the standard "don't do this" clause. Not only are these types of tools unreliable by their very nature, but they also violate eBay policies.

WWW::Search::eBay. This Perl module, written by Glenn Wood and available at search.cpan.org/perldoc?WWW::Search::eBay,
scrapes eBay search pages and returns the results. See [Hack #17] for a working example. Note that
updated versions can also be found at alumni.caltech.edu/~glenwood/SOFTWARE/.

php eBay List. This PHP script, available at
www.aeoninteractive.net, parses your About Me
page to obtain a list of your currently running auctions, which you
can then list on your own site. See [Hack #78] for the official way to do this
(and make money to boot).

grep. This little Perl function (also a program found on any Unix system)
allows you to search text or a file for a particular string of
characters. If you download any page from eBay.com using
lwp-download, you can build your own scraper with
grep in just a few lines of code.