Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.
At the bottom of the chain on mastodon the creator says they use the search APIs of the store websites. I wouldn’t have expected those to be easily accessible!
Yeah a lot of chains even have a documented, developer-friendly API. If that’s not available though, you can usually figure out the API just by looking at the calls your browser makes when visiting a page. Most sites use a REST API for catalog pages that’s then rendered out with JavaScript.
If that doesn’t work, then you can usually scrape everything with Selenium. It’s a little harder to do, but still quite manageable, though that usually has to be a background job, as it’s slow.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
The project is Open source, so you might be able to leverage it for Canadian data. All you need is:
At the bottom of the chain on mastodon the creator says they use the search APIs of the store websites. I wouldn’t have expected those to be easily accessible!
Yeah a lot of chains even have a documented, developer-friendly API. If that’s not available though, you can usually figure out the API just by looking at the calls your browser makes when visiting a page. Most sites use a REST API for catalog pages that’s then rendered out with JavaScript.
If that doesn’t work, then you can usually scrape everything with Selenium. It’s a little harder to do, but still quite manageable, though that usually has to be a background job, as it’s slow.