Tracking discount percentages on e-commerce websites with Ruby

Orrin Ajay · 2024-12-18T10:03:20+00:00

Tracking discount percentages from e-commerce websites is a common task for price monitoring. Discounts are often displayed alongside product titles and prices, either as a percentage or a discounted price. Using Ruby with the Nokogiri library, you can extract this data from static pages. For dynamically loaded pages, integrating Ruby with a headless browser like Selenium is essential to fetch the required elements. Additionally, calculating discounts programmatically by comparing original and sale prices is straightforward with Ruby's robust data manipulation features.Here’s an example of tracking discounts using Ruby and Nokogiri:require 'nokogiri' require 'open-uri'url 'https://example.com/products'doc Nokogiri::HTML(URI.open(url))doc.css('.product-item').each do |product| title product.css('.product-title').text.strip original_price product.css('.original-price').text.strip sale_price product.css('.sale-price').text.strip discount ((original_price.to_f - sale_price.to_f) / original_price.to_f * 100).round(2) puts "Product: #{title}, Discount: #{discount}%"endFor large-scale scraping, integrating a proxy service and implementing rate-limiting ensures smooth operation without triggering anti-scraping measures. How do you handle products with missing or inconsistent pricing data?

General Web Scraping

Tracking discount percentages on e-commerce websites with Ruby

Posted by Orrin Ajay on 12/18/2024 at 10:03 am
Tracking discount percentages from e-commerce websites is a common task for price monitoring. Discounts are often displayed alongside product titles and prices, either as a percentage or a discounted price. Using Ruby with the Nokogiri library, you can extract this data from static pages. For dynamically loaded pages, integrating Ruby with a headless browser like Selenium is essential to fetch the required elements. Additionally, calculating discounts programmatically by comparing original and sale prices is straightforward with Ruby’s robust data manipulation features.
Here’s an example of tracking discounts using Ruby and Nokogiri:
```
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
url = 'https://example.com/products'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(URI.open(url))
doc.css('.product-item').each do |product|
  title = product.css('.product-title').text.strip
  original_price = product.css('.original-price').text.strip
  sale_price = product.css('.sale-price').text.strip
  discount = ((original_price.to_f - sale_price.to_f) / original_price.to_f * 100).round(2)
  puts "Product: #{title}, Discount: #{discount}%"
end
```
For large-scale scraping, integrating a proxy service and implementing rate-limiting ensures smooth operation without triggering anti-scraping measures. How do you handle products with missing or inconsistent pricing data?
David Maja replied 2 days, 9 hours ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
1 Reply

David Maja

Member
12/20/2024 at 9:53 am

When prices are inconsistent or missing, I add error handling to skip such products. Logging these cases helps me review and update the scraper logic later.

Tracking discount percentages on e-commerce websites with Ruby

David Maja