How to get product information from amazon, just based on the URL?

Question

I just have a link to a product page, at amazon. How do I get all the information (photo, price etc), in my ruby program, just using this link?

Answer 1

In your program: fetch the page and parse HTML. Filter out the required information. There may be some libraries in Ruby (that I am unaware of), which parse HTML.

hpricot seems to do what you want.

Answer 2

If you want to do this, the Nokogiri or hpricot libraries both allow HTML parsing and searching. However, this kind of screen-scraping is notoriously unreliable (as it may break any time Amazon decides to reorganize their HTML), so if you're planning to do this sort of thing for any length of time I'd recommend leveraging the Amazon Product Advertising API instead.

Answer 3

I found this library (I'm using Rails) amazon-ecs I'm experimenting with it. Still, I'd require some kind of ID (product id?) to get details of a particular product. For example, consider this link to kindle

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Generation/dp/B00154JDAI/ref=amb_link_84372271_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=06JJGQP9J3BHKPE38SXP&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=478184871&pf_rd_i=507846

In that link, I noticed ASIN, which is B00154JDAI.

Looks like I can use this ID, to get product information (using amazon-ecs). I just need to parse the URL, to get ASIN.

Is there any other way to do it?

No, I am not going to do screen scraping, that is not a good idea anytime.

Answer 4

You should use the library Ruby/AWS (google for it, my karma is not high enough to allow external links...). It has been written exactly for that.

You might need to use the built-in Search to find the item you're looking for. After that, the API gives access to pictures, links and all usable information.