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I'm trying to get notified when a site updates stock of a certain product. The site has a select box with a list of items, this list gets items added randomly during the week.

Is it possible to do the following? -check select list on website every x minutes -if list has changed since last check do this.

If someone could guide me into what i need to research and look at, that would be great!

Namenone
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1 Answers1

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Basically, my preferred way is using some Server-Side language such as PHP/Java and make a HTTP-Request and then parse the page and find the requested select/element.

You've tagged this question as javascript/jquery so I'm guessing you're aiming to this kind of solution.

It's possible. You'll need to make a cross-domain request and parse the results to get the select box value.

Take a look at this question for how to make a cross domain request:

Loading cross domain endpoint with jQuery AJAX

take a look at jQuery API to parse and traverse HTML.

the rest is basically case-specific programming

Community
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Shay Elkayam
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  • Ok great! There doesn't seem to be a readme or tutorial for it. How do i go about actually using the files from git? – Namenone Mar 08 '14 at 17:46
  • Okay that was easy haha! I've managed to parse with YQL. I've come across an issue however. The site im trying to parse has 5 items in the drop down list. It does not display the items not in stock. However, when i parse the data. I seem to get back all 20 drop down items, even though only 5 are displaying on the actual site(the ones in stock). Any idea why this is happening?. if i do an inspect element on the drop down box, it only shows the 5 items. – Namenone Mar 08 '14 at 18:00
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    They probably have some js that removes the unstocked items after page is loaded. – Shay Elkayam Mar 08 '14 at 18:03
  • let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/49317/discussion-between-shay-elkayam-and-namenone) – Shay Elkayam Mar 08 '14 at 18:11