Question

Im fairly new to android dev and I want to build an app that basically uses a user’s area code, and searches nearby safeway locations for deals on a user specified item. I believe this requires a bit of datamining or manipulating javascript found with inspect element, But I just dont know how to approach this.

Thanks, Adam

Answer 1

Unless they provide an API (highly unlikely), you are going to have to parse their website. Typically the first step is to find out if you can build a URL to a page that has the necessary data. For example, you might find that their site is organized with pages like this:

example.com/nearby-location/12345/
example.com/nearby-location/<area code here>/

Or something like that. From there, you can use a variety of libraries to parse that page.

My personal choice for HTML parsing on Android is Jsoup. It’s fairly small, it’s easy to integrate with Android, it’s easy to use, and it works.

http://jsoup.org/

That said, there are a million other possible HTML parsing libraries and they all pretty much do the same thing.