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@scrapehero
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Python 3 Code to scrape prices from ebay.com
import argparse
from pprint import pprint
from traceback import format_exc
import requests
import unicodecsv as csv
from lxml import html
def parse(brand):
url = 'https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw={0}&_sacat=0'.format(brand)
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.103 Safari/537.36'}
failed = False
# Retries for handling network errors
for _ in range(5):
print ("Retrieving %s"%(url))
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, verify=False)
parser = html.fromstring(response.text)
print ("Parsing page")
if response.status_code!=200:
failed = True
continue
else:
failed = False
break
if failed:
return []
product_listings = parser.xpath('//li[contains(@id,"results-listing")]')
raw_result_count = parser.xpath("//h1[contains(@class,'count-heading')]//text()")
result_count = ''.join(raw_result_count).strip()
print ("Found {0} for {1}".format(result_count,brand))
scraped_products = []
for product in product_listings:
raw_url = product.xpath('.//a[contains(@class,"item__link")]/@href')
raw_title = product.xpath('.//h3[contains(@class,"item__title")]//text()')
raw_product_type = product.xpath('.//h3[contains(@class,"item__title")]/span[@class="LIGHT_HIGHLIGHT"]/text()')
raw_price = product.xpath('.//span[contains(@class,"s-item__price")]//text()')
price = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_price).split())
title = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_title).split())
product_type = ''.join(raw_product_type)
title = title.replace(product_type, '').strip()
data = {
'url':raw_url[0],
'title':title,
'price':price
}
scraped_products.append(data)
return scraped_products
if __name__=="__main__":
argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
argparser.add_argument('brand',help = 'Brand Name')
args = argparser.parse_args()
brand = args.brand
scraped_data = parse(brand)
if scraped_data:
print ("Writing scraped data to %s-ebay-scraped-data.csv"%(brand))
with open('%s-ebay-scraped-data.csv'%(brand),'wb') as csvfile:
fieldnames = ["title","price","url"]
writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile,fieldnames = fieldnames,quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
writer.writeheader()
for data in scraped_data:
writer.writerow(data)
else:
print("No data scraped")
@m1k2sh2
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m1k2sh2 commented Nov 26, 2018

Hi,
i got an error below when i run this script on IDLE
Would you advise me how to solve this error?

I'm new to Python it's so complicated...


usage: ebay_scraper.py [-h] brand
ebay_scraper.py: error: the following arguments are required: brand

Thank you

@tmanok
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tmanok commented Mar 14, 2019

@m1o2sh2 If you read the error you're missing an argument in your command. Also python is the easiest programming language available, but it's interpretive which means it's slow (that's why I dislike it personally). [https://www.scrapehero.com/how-to-scrape-competitor-prices-from-ebay-com-using-python-and-lxml/] Take a look at this instructional link.

@rockc2020
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hello @tmanok, I tried it but got nothing. I print the raw content response.text which doesn't contain any class of 'lvresult' or 'rcnt'. I guess eBay might have already changed their searching result page.

@pvd232
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pvd232 commented May 1, 2019

Hello fellow githubbers, I have also run this code and am receiving the same error m1k2sh2. I run the python script in my IDLE and am told I am missing the required brand argument. I understand this is a required argument, however I do not understand how I input this argument when running the code. I simply click 'Run module' in the python file and in my shell I am told I am missing the argument. When I try to call the function directly in the shell I receive an error that the function is not defined. Please help me. I spent so much time setting up the PIP and PIPENV. Thank you.

@pvd232
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pvd232 commented May 1, 2019

@McSpooder
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@pvd232 you need to run the script from the terminal. If you are using windows 10 that would be in cmd.

  1. open cmd.
  2. navigate to the script directory by entering "cd [directory of the script]"
  3. run the script with the argument by typing "ebay_scraper.py [brand]"

@swardlincoln
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The code ran super quick and is a nice spring board to start from. The only thing I noticed was that the number of results reported from the command line and the number of results written to CSV don't match. Is this a pagination problem due to the search result being listed over several pages?

@pvd232
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pvd232 commented Jul 11, 2019 via email

@swardlincoln
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swardlincoln commented Jul 11, 2019

@pvd232 I ran this code 3 hours ago and it ran just fine. I got a CSV with values in it and checked those url in the CSV against Ebay and they matched.

@jenaalsup
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Hello everyone,
I have tried to run the code for Samsung (and a few other companies) and I keep on getting the same error. For Samsung, it says "Found 52,503 results for Samsung for Samsung", however, it says "No data scraped" right below it and no csv file is made. I tried printing out the product_listings variable and it came up empty. Does anyone have suggestions of what I am doing wrong? Thank you.

@borncrispy
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borncrispy commented Jun 6, 2020

Hello everyone,
I have tried to run the code for Samsung (and a few other companies) and I keep on getting the same error. For Samsung, it says "Found 52,503 results for Samsung for Samsung", however, it says "No data scraped" right below it and no csv file is made. I tried printing out the product_listings variable and it came up empty. Does anyone have suggestions of what I am doing wrong? Thank you.

@jenaalsup It may not have anything to do with what you are doing. I'm running into the same thing when I run the code and last year it worked just fine. I have a feeling it has to do with the way the code is parsing the html. If you print response.text you will see that there are definitely results being returned. My only suggestion would be to tackle each statement that is transforming the data by printing the results after the transformation to see what is happening.

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