August 2003
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 33m
English
Content preview from Amazon HacksBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Scrape Product Reviews
Amazon has made some reviews available through their Web Services API, but most are available only at the Amazon.com web site, requiring a little screen scraping to grab.
Here’s an even more powerful way to integrate Amazon reviews with your web site. Unlike linking to reviews [Hack #28] or monitoring reviews for changes [Hack #31], this puts the entire text of Amazon reviews on your web site.
The easiest and most reliable way to access customer reviews programmatically is through the Web Services API. Unfortunately, the API gives only a small window to the larger number of reviews available. An API query for the book Cluetrain Manifesto, for example, includes three user reviews. If you visit the review page [Hack #28] for that book, though, you’ll find 128 reviews. To dig deeper into the reviews available on Amazon.com and use all of them on your own web site, you’ll need to delve deeper into scripting.
The Code
This Perl script, get_reviews.pl , builds a URL to the reviews page for a given ASIN, uses regular expressions to find the reviews, and breaks the review into its pieces: rating, title, date, reviewer, and the text of the review.
#!/usr/bin/perl # get_reviews.pl # # A script to scrape Amazon, retrieve reviews, and write to a file # Usage: perl get_reviews.pl <asin> use strict; use warnings; use LWP::Simple; # Take the asin from the command-line my $asin = shift @ARGV or die "Usage: perl get_reviews.pl <asin>\n"; # Assemble the URL from the passed asin. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.