Automated Web Scraping of Product Prices using Perl

Perl Selenium to automate the web scraping of product prices from an online store. The goal is to collect up-to-date price data on products for analysis and comparison.

To get started, you will need to create a Perl script that opens the product page in a browser, extracts the product name and price, and saves it to a file or database. You can use the find_element and get_text methods to locate and extract data from the page.

Here's some example code to extract the product name and price:

use Selenium::Remote::Driver;

my $driver = Selenium::Remote::Driver->new(
    browser_name => 'firefox'
);

# Navigate to the product page
$driver->get('https://example.com/product');

# Extract the product name and price
my $product_name = $driver->find_element('product_name_selector')->get_text();
my $product_price = $driver->find_element('product_price_selector')->get_text();

You can then use the write_file or insert_row methods to save the data to a file or database for later analysis.

Here's some example code to write the data to a CSV file:

use Text::CSV
# Write the product data to a CSV file
my $csv = Text::CSV->new({ binary => 1, eol => "\n" });
open my $fh, '>>', 'product_prices.csv' or die "product_prices.csv: $!";
$csv->print($fh, [$product_name, $product_price]);
close $fh;

You can then use a loop and a sleep method to automate the process of scraping product prices from multiple pages on the online store.

Here's some example code to loop through multiple product pages:

use Time::HiRes qw(sleep);

# List of product page URLs to scrape
my @product_urls = ('https://example.com/product1', 'https://example.com/product2', 'https://example.com/product3');

foreach my $product_url (@product_urls) {
    # Navigate to the product page
    $driver->get($product_url);

    # Extract the product name and price
    my $product_name = $driver->find_element('product_name_selector')->get_text();
    my $product_price = $driver->find_element('product_price_selector')->get_text();

    # Write the product data to a CSV file
    my $csv = Text::CSV->new({ binary => 1, eol => "\n" });
    open my $fh, '>>', 'product_prices.csv' or die "product_prices.csv: $!";
    $csv->print($fh, [$product_name, $product_price]);
    close $fh;

    # Wait for a few seconds before scraping the next page
    sleep(5);
}

You can also use the screenshot method to capture screenshots of the product pages and any error messages that may appear during scraping.Thanks.