Programmatic access to Amazon Wishlist?

StasM picture StasM · Dec 31, 2010 · Viewed 18.6k times · Source

Amazon recently changed their APIs which and it seems there's no way now to access my WishList on Amazon programmatically using these APIs. Anybody knows any way to do it besides screen-scraping? Maybe some third-party service (I don't mind working with only public data)?

Answer

robd picture robd · Jan 9, 2011

For screen scraping, the compact layout style might be helpful: http://bililite.com/blog/2010/10/31/hacking-my-way-to-an-amazon-wishlist-widget/

Update

I did some hacking of my own in google spreadsheets and managed to get 2 basic implementations working.

Using Google Apps Scripts:

Type your wishlist ID into cell A1. Copy and paste the following into a google apps script (Tools > Scripts > Scripts Editor), and run the getWishlist function:

function getWishlist(){
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheets()[0];
  var wishlistId = sheet.getRange('a1').getValue(); 
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch("http://www.amazon.co.uk/registry/wishlist/" + wishlistId + "?layout=compact").getContentText();
  var asinRegex = /name="item.([\d]+)\.(?:[A-Z0-9]+).([A-Z0-9]+).*/g
  while (match = asinRegex.exec(response)) {
    var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheets()[0];
    var rowIndex = Number(match[1])+2;
    var asin = match[2];
    setRow(sheet, rowIndex, asin);
    var offers = UrlFetchApp.fetch("http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/" + asin).getContentText();    
    setRow(sheet, rowIndex, asin, 
           getFirstMatch(/class="producttitle">(.+)</g, offers),
           getFirstMatch(/class="price">(.+)</g, offers));
  }  
  Browser.msgBox("Finished");
}

function getFirstMatch(regex, text) {
  var match = regex.exec(text);
  return (match == null) ? "Unknown" : match[1];
}

function setRow(sheet, index, a, b, c) {
  sheet.getRange('a' + index).setValue(a);
  sheet.getRange('b' + index).setValue(b);
  sheet.getRange('c' + index).setValue(c);
}

​ ​ NB, I'm having some probs with regex matching the title / price. Not sure why, but shows the basic idea.

Using Google Spreadsheet Functions

Type your wishlist ID into cell A1.

Type the following function into A2. It will populate the cell and all below it with the id strings for each item in your wishlist:

=importXML("http://www.amazon.co.uk/registry/wishlist/"&A1&"?layout=compact", "//*[starts-with(@name, 'item.')]/@name")

Type the following function into B2, which will extract the asin from the id string:

=right(A2, 10)

Type the following function into B3, which will fetch the offer listing for the asin in B2 and display the title:

=importXML("http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/"&B2, "//h1")

Type the following function into B4, which will fetch the offer listing for the asin in B2 and display all the prices:

=concatenate(importXML("http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/"&B2, "//span[@class='price']"))