This is a program I wrote (for a friend...) to determine if the Lollapalooza secret sale for the cheap tickets had begun. The program uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the site, checking to see if the ticket text had been changed from "SOON." If so, it would send an alert email. The program was successful and did alert my friend when the tickets went…

lollapalooza.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib2, time, smtplib, string
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# In this section, set up your information. TO - email address to send to.
# FROM - email to send from. username/password are for FROM email.

TO = ''
FROM = ''
username = ''
password = ''

x = 'hello'

while x != 'done':
	
	try:
		page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.lollapalooza.com/tickets/").read()
		soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

		ticket_box = soup.find(id="ticket-box")
		tickets = ticket_box.find_all("span")

		ticks = tickets[0]
		souvenir = ticks.find_all("span")

		if souvenir[0].text == "Souvenir" and souvenir[4].text == "SOON":
			print "Checked."
			time.sleep(60)
		elif souvenir[0].text == "Souvenir" and souvenir[4].text != "SOON":
			SUBJECT = "LOLLAPALOOZA TICKETS"
			text = "RIGHT NOW"
			BODY = string.join((
				"From: %s" % FROM,
		                "To: %s" % TO,
		                "Subject: %s" % SUBJECT ,
		                "",
		                text
		                ), "\r\n")
	    		server = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com:587")
	    		server.ehlo()
	    		server.starttls()
	    		server.login(username, password)
	    		server.sendmail(FROM, [TO], BODY)
	    		server.quit()
	    
	    		x = 'done'

	except:
		print "Too many requests."
		continue