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FULL AUTOMATION SCRIPT AND EXPLANATION:

To automate the task of monitoring the price of a product on eBay and notifying the user if the price falls below a certain threshold, I followed these steps and outline possible solutions:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

These lines import the necessary libraries needed to ensure the code runs properly.

The requests library is used for making HTTP requests to fetch web pages or interact with web services, while BeautifulSoup is used for parsing and navigating the HTML/XML content fetched using requests, making it easier to extract and manipulate data from web pages. These two libraries are commonly used together in web scraping and web automation tasks.

1. Fetching HTML Content:

Use the requests library to send a GET request to the eBay product page and retrieve the HTML content. I have implemented this in my code with

requests.get(URL, headers=headers)

2. Parsing HTML:

Utilize a HTML parser like BeautifulSoup to extract relevant information such as product title and price from the HTML content. I have used BeautifulSoup to extract the product title and price in the code.

soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'html.parser')

3. Extracting Product Information:

Identify the HTML elements (classes or IDs) that contain the product title and price, and then extract their text content. I have used soup.find() and soup.select() methods to locate and extract the product title and price.

product_title = soup.find(class_='ux-textspans ux-textspans--BOLD').get_text()
print(product_title)

product_price = soup.select('#mainContent > div > div.vim.x-price-section.mar-t-20 > div > div > div > span')

4.

The product_price is a span html text scraped from the website. Then using a loop, the value of the line is taken as p.text. The value p.text contains US $ at the beginning. To format this value without "US $" the substring is taken starting from the index 4 and upto 7. The the final value is of text of 3 digit. So it is converted to integer using int(). Later, the product_price_value is printed as integer.


for p in product_price:
    print(p.text)
    product_price_value = int(p.text[4:7])
    print(product_price_value)

5. Comparing Prices:

Compare the extracted price against a predefined threshold (e.g., $400) to determine if it has fallen below the threshold. I have implemented a check_price() function to compare the product price against $400 and print a notification accordingly.

def check_price():
    if (product_price_value < 400):
        print('Congrats! The price has fallen to : $' , product_price_value)
    else:
        print('Sorry, The price is still $400')

6. Notification Mechanism:

Implement a notification mechanism to inform the user when the price falls below the threshold. This involves sending a Telegram message to the user.

import requests

def send_to_telegram(message):

    apiToken = '6490356169:AAGpU9ojduVolrj6U3gi0dvUmMgAuCp_2wg'
    chatID = '6847742875'
    apiURL = f'https://api.telegram.org/bot{apiToken}/sendMessage'

    try:
        response = requests.post(apiURL, json={'chat_id': chatID, 'text': message})
        print(response.text)
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)

send_to_telegram('Sorry, The price is still $400')


apiToken

Telegram Bot API token, which is obtained when creating a bot through the BotFather on Telegram.

chatID

The ID of the chat that want to send the message to. This can be a group chat ID or a user ID. Here I used my personal chat Id to test.

apiURL

The URL of the Telegram Bot API endpoint for sending messages.

requests.post(apiURL, json={'chat_id': chatID, 'text': message})

Sends a POST request to the Telegram Bot API with the chat ID and message text as JSON data.

The function send_to_telegram encapsulates this logic, making it easy to send messages to Telegram from anywhere in the Python code

7.

if __name__ == '__main__':
    check_price()

This block ensures that the check_price function is executed only if the script is run as the main program (not imported as a module).

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