How can i make a chrome extension if there is no API is in offer?

Question

How can i make a chrome extension for searching a shopping site like www.flipkart.com or www.junglee.com as they don't offer an API?

Something like this - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kjajclaocdighkjplbekkofpmdbcjghf

Answer 1

Try using yahoo pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) to scrape the websites. Yahoo pipes provide a list of rules which choose from. But some sites do block Y! pipes scraper and sends a response of 403.

Answer 2

This is not easy. you can try to fetch the site with Ajax and parse it with regex. take a look here Open webpage and parse it using JavaScript

Answer 3

This will be gross... and more than likely break over a short period of time. But without an API the best way would be to do an Ajax request with an XMLHttpRequest and then parse out the site using javascript or jQuery based on the sites markup classes and ID's.

Essential you are scraping the site.

Although this would work it probably won't be worth your time - if the site was designed well the markup classes and id's shouldn't change to much, it will be the css that changes. But this is not guaranteed by the dev team behind the website. An API is more of a guarantee, and I would be iffy about spending a lot of time scraping a site that does not provide an API because more than likely the markup will change as the company grows and hires engineers.

Good luck though!