PC Games

Orb
Lasagne Monsters
Three Guys Apocalypse
Water Closet
Blob Wars : Attrition
The Legend of Edgar
TBFTSS: The Pandoran War
Three Guys
Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer
Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid
Project: Starfighter
TANX Squadron

Tutorials

2D shoot 'em up
2D top-down shooter
2D platform game
Sprite atlas tutorial
Working with TTF fonts
2D adventure game
Widget tutorial
2D shoot 'em up sequel
2D run and gun
Roguelike
Medals (Achievements)
2D turn-based strategy game
2D isometric game
2D map editor
2D mission-based shoot 'em up
2D Santa game
2D split screen game
SDL 1 tutorials (outdated)

Latest Updates

SDL2 Versus game tutorial
Wed, 20th March 2024

Download keys for SDL2 tutorials on itch.io
Sat, 16th March 2024

The Legend of Edgar 1.37
Mon, 1st January 2024

SDL2 Santa game tutorial 🎅
Thu, 23rd November 2023

SDL2 Shooter 3 tutorial
Wed, 15th February 2023

All Updates »

Tags

android (3)
battle-for-the-solar-system (10)
blob-wars (10)
brexit (1)
code (6)
edgar (9)
games (43)
lasagne-monsters (1)
making-of (5)
match3 (1)
numberblocksonline (1)
orb (2)
site (1)
tanx (4)
three-guys (3)
three-guys-apocalypse (3)
tutorials (17)
water-closet (4)

Books


Alysha

When her village is attacked and her friends and family are taken away to be sold as slaves, Alysha Tanner sets out on a quest across the world to track them down and return them home. Along the way, she is aided by the most unlikely of allies - the world's last remaining dragon.

Click here to learn more and read an extract!

Scraping Amazon's Wishlist

Sat, 21st May 2016

I wanted to keep track of the prices on my Amazon wishlist, in case something I was after suddenly dipped in price (as they do), and I could grab myself a bargain. I shoved together a little script in PHP, that would extract the items and prices, compared them to the previous prices, and email me if the price dropped. It's not a complicated script and doesn't do anything fancy (like track the original price, etc.)

It will notify if ever a price drops compared to the previous price it recorded. I was going to keep a track of the lowest prices, but I figured that this might be one off, and would only ever notify once. And while this script does notify for any price drop, I only receive one or two emails per day, so it's not spamming me. If you use this script as part of a scheduled job (such as cron) I would recommend not calling it more than once an hour, at most. I've read suggestions that Amazon could blacklist your ip address if it happens to think you're attacking the site. Once an hour is plenty.

Note: this script has only been run against Amazon UK. You may need to modify the $url to suit your own needs.

#!/usr/bin/php

<?php

	$OUT_FILE = "path/to/wishList.json";
	$EMAIL_TO = "example@example.com";
	$WISHLIST_ID = "wishlist.id";
	
	$items = [];
	
	function getItems()
	{
		global $items;
		global $OUT_FILE, $EMAIL_TO, $WISHLIST_ID;
		
		$page = 1;
		$hasMore = false;
		$lastTitle = "";
		$sanity = 0;
		
		do
		{
			$hasMore = false;
		
			$url = "https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/wishlist/$WISHLIST_ID/ref=cm_wl_sortbar_o_page_2?ie=UTF8&page=$page";
		
			$html = file_get_contents($url);
			
			$regex = '/title="([^"]+)" href="\\/dp/i';
			preg_match_all($regex, $html, $title);
			$title[1] = array_unique($title[1]);
			$titles = array_values($title[1]);
			
			$regex = '/[ ]{2,}(\\£([0-9.]+)|Unavailable)/i';
			preg_match_all($regex, $html, $price);
			$prices = $price[2];
			
			if (count($titles) == count($prices))
			{
				for ($i = 0 ; $i < count($titles) ; $i++)
				{
					$title = "$titles[$i]";
					$price = 0 + $prices[$i];
					
					$items[$title] = $price;
					
					echo "$title = $price\n";
				}
				
				$hasMore = $lastTitle != $titles[0];
				
				$lastTitle = $titles[0];
			}
			
			$page++;
			
			if (++$sanity >= 10)
			{
				$hasMore = false;
			}
			
			sleep(1);
		}
		while ($hasMore);
	}
	
	getItems();
	
	if (file_exists($OUT_FILE))
	{
		$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($OUT_FILE), true);
		
		if (count($items) == 0 && count($json) > 0)
		{
			mail($EMAIL_TO, "Wishlist checker failed", "");
		}
		
		foreach ($items as $title => $price)
		{
			$price = round($price, 2);
		
			$diff = 0;
			
			if (isset($json[$title]))
			{
				$diff = round($price - $json[$title], 2);
			}
			
			if ($price > 0 && $diff < 0)
			{
				$subject = "$title : £$price ($diff)";
				
				mail($EMAIL_TO, $subject, "");
			}
			
			$items[$title] = $price;
		}
	}
	
	$json = json_encode($items, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
	
	//mail($EMAIL_TO, "Prices", $json);
	
	file_put_contents($OUT_FILE, $json);

?>

To run this script, copy the code above into a file (or download it at the bottom of this page), update the $OUT_FILE, $WISHLIST_ID, and $EMAIL_TO with actual, valid values, chmod +x the file, and then run it. To wit:

> vi wishList.sh
> chmod +x wishList.sh
> ./wishList.sh

All being well, the wishlist should be scraped, and a JSON file output containing all the items and prices. The code will attempt to scan multiple pages, so you can have more than 25 items (the current limit per page) in your list.

Downloads: wishList.sh (0Kb)
 
code 

Related News

Orb source code
Mon, 26th April 2021

Lasagne Monsters source code
Tue, 20th April 2021

3 Guys Apocalypse source code
Sun, 11th April 2021

A Reddit Wallpaper download script
Fri, 27th May 2016

Resizing an array in C
Thu, 19th May 2016

Mobile site