[Wellington-pm] grabaseat screen-scraping

[Lenz Gschwendtner]

On 19/08/2010, at 1:03 PM, Douglas Bagnall wrote:

> Years ago, back in the level 2 days, somebody did a talk about finding
> cheap air tickets (to Tauranga, of all places, if my memory is correct
> (or perhaps Gisborne -- that sort of direction)), by capturing
> periodic screenshots of grabaseat.co.nz, which in those days was all
> Flash, and performing OCR or something.  The script would email them
> when the price was good.

that project won for pure awesomeness though, honestly, the approach was very geeky and solved the problem nicely :-) i guess we decided back then that it was not an official perlmongers talk tough.

> Maybe it was Martyn.  Perhaps he had relatives in Tauranga.  Or
> in-laws.
> 
> Anyway I was reminded of it today when I saw this URL:
> 
> http://flightbookings.airnewzealand.co.nz/vgrabview/en_NZ/getSpecials.do?json=y

they offer rss feeds, twitter, and a collection of other feeds in the meantime. 

> [from http://pastebin.com/ucUWfAJ6, by the author known as 'ReziN' on
> freenode, in #nzpug]
> 
> If whoever it was is still working on that project, I hope this is
> useful.

a script that would do the booking right away would be nice though :-) should actually be quite straight forward using a bit of WWW:Mechanizer goodness.