eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Track Items in Your Watching List

Link an off-eBay auction tracker with eBay’s Items I’m Watching list.

eBay provides the Items I’m Watching list (in My eBay → Bidding/Watching) to help you keep track of auctions on which you haven’t yet bid. A corresponding API call, GetWatchList, allows you to access the contents of that list.

But the Items I’m Watching list is rather limited and can be replaced with a custom tracking list [Hack #29] . Although the hack works, there are two simple ways to use the eBay API to make the script more robust and efficient:

• Retrieve the title and end date with the GetItem API call instead of using the flakier method of extracting them from the auction page title.

• Supplement the tracking list with any auctions in the Items I’m Watching list.

The following is a revised auction-tracking script with both of these improvements.

Tip

This script requires all the Perl modules specified in “Keep Track of Auctions Outside of eBay” [Hack #29] , as well as Time::Local, by Tom Christiansen, Graham Barr, and Dave Rolsky (search.cpan.org/perldoc?Time::Local), which is used to convert dates retrieved from the API from GMT to local time.

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	require 'ebay.pl';
	use Time::ParseDate;
	use Time::Local;
	use POSIX qw(strftime);
	require 'cgi-lib.pl';

	&ReadParse;
	$selfurl = "http://www.ebayhacks.com/exec/track.pl";
	$localfile = "ebay list.txt"; $timeoffset = 0; @formatting=("color=#EE0000 STYLE=font-weight:bold", "color=#000000 STYLE=font-weight:bold", "color=#000000"); ...