I'm trying to search a website for information (i.e. lets say I make an application for cinemas, the user inputs the name of the film and the cinema he wants and the application prints the times).
So in the background the application would go to the cinemas webpage, use the webpages search engine, parse the page and print a list of times.
I honestly don't know where to start so any help or tips would be most welcome.
Thank you in advance,
Aterin
After much thought I found a way of doing this, I need to use a GET with the url and fill in the url based on the input of the user.
For example on the website http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ it would be:
String url = "http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search_results.php?keywords=" + keyword + "&cat=" + cat;
and then filter the resulting HTML based on the websites CSS (in this case they have a tag for listing products, so all I need to do is search for the alt = keyword and then do another GET with the corresponding href.
There is however a serious problem with this method, if the website is altered then all this goes down the sink hole. That said, I can't think of any other solution.
You would need to first locate a suitable API to serve your data and then parse the data within your application to display it as you deem fit.
Some info on Movies API
Related
We have a phone gap cross-platform built app and we are building the same app in native.
The app has pages/views with text with embedded hyperlinks in them where it sends the user to other pages in the same app. Of course because this is HTML based so this is possible using phone gap apps. But what if we changed that to native how can we have links inside a text where it redirects users to other views or grabs other data from the database and pushes them to the UIViewController?
How will the backend send us JSON strings with hyperlinks in them that will be able to replicate what the phone gap built app does. Is this possible?
Ok maybe we can send embedded HTML in the JSON data. But how will these <a> links open or grab other data from the server?
I find it very complicated or maybe not doable at all. Anybody has ideas on how this could be solved?
A screen shot of what i mean. This is a phone gap app.
All right first and foremost you need structured data.
Lets say I opend a main post with id '14'. Api will fetch data from server for id 14.
JSON structure can be like this:
{"title":"What are origional sin?","content":"Although Adam & Eve had been given. God has given man free will.","inlineLinks":[{"startIndex":"8","endIndex":"18","contentId":"141"},{"startIndex":"55","endIndex":"64","contentId":"142"}]}
Now using spannable string in android and attributed string in ios you now have id for specific inline link content and start and end index which you can use to add clicks to specific inline links. Once user clicks these link you have id of that specific content which you can open in your app.
Since you know the spannable string I hope you dont need the detail code.
Wish you have started your question with Spannable String problem.
Please ignore the indexes incase they are wrong ;)
I want to write an app get the information from posts (mostly about new classes) on my university website then make some annoucement once there is new class.
I've google and see RSS mostly, but the page I want to get data does not use RSS. I read something about website using service so we can read XML in the app, but I don't know if the page using service or not. Last resort is using host (somee for example) and js to get text from the page, then the app could read data from the host.
That's all I have right now, but it's still unclear for me. Any suggestion about what to read, what should I use?? Much appreciation
I think the first thing you do should be to ask your uni if they provide any feed or webservice for these data that you could use.
If they don't, or don't answer at all, your last resort would be scraping. To do this, you can use an HTML parser, like jsoup, and then go through the HTML data, getting information as you need.
To see if there are been changes, you would just have to cache your current processed information, probably in a database, and compare the new one to the one currently saved.
Hello I am beginner to Android development so I want to ask how to create dynamically changeable database (content) in Android?
I'm aware of sqlite shared preferences but how can I interact with them via internet and add new information like news apps? Could Parse help?
This is not a answer, but a comment rather, I don't have the 50 rep required to comment.
It all depends on the sort of functionality you want to achieve. I.e. do you want to be able to push new content to the device using the internet such as push notifications.
OR
Do you want the app to make a http connection to a api or your own news service on startup or on button press for example?
UPDATE
Ok you have decided you want something similar to option 2. I am not going to write code for you but I will point you in the right direction and if you get stuck, post a question.
Please take a look at:-
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rsoftware.news
If you have decided this is what you want or similar, this application uses an API calling infrastructure.
The API they use is called FAROO.
http://www.faroo.com/hp/api/api.html
I suggest reading the documentation, deciding if this is indeed what you want, then sign up and get a API key. Afterall it is free! enjoy coding, enjoy the errors that you will receive and persevere =).
How to make a API call
I suggest when using a API, test the queries through the browser first of all or use something like Runscope for testing their services. So first get their URL which is:-
http://www.faroo.com/api
If we were to go to this url we will get a 401 response code, which means unauthorised. This is because we haven't added our unique API key to the html query. So this url can take parameters. We simply append a ? to the end of the url and supply the parameters that FAROO offers such as:-
q which stands for query (what do you want FAROO to search for?)
start which is the number it should start from
length which is the number of results you want FAROO to return
key which is your unique to make the requests
etc etc...
So an example of a complete url would be:-
http://www.faroo.com/api?q=iphone&start=1&length=10&l=en&src=news&f=json
This url is for demonstration purposes... your own url will have a key=YourAPIKey
Also notice how the parameters are separated by & symbols i.e. q=iphone&start=1 so this part q we know stands for query which is iphone & start=1 & so on.
Hope this helps.
I am trying to write a little Android app for my daughter. The goal is to scan a book's bar code and pass the ISBN number to this website: http://www.arbookfind.com/default.aspx . The result will show if the book is part of the Accelerated Reader program and how many points the book is worth. I am trying to automate the part where the ISBN would need to be entered into the search field.
For simplicity's sake, and because I'm not a programmer, I am using MIT's App Inventor 2. I can now scan and get the ISBN but I will need to know how to format a URL to the website that will allow me to pass the ISBN to it's search page.
Is it possible to send a variable via the URL similar to index.php?myvar=testing&someothervar=somethingelse ? I've tried but perhaps I am not using the correct variable name or format for aspx. Is there an easy way to see what the variable name is in the aspx displayed page in my browser?
EDIT To clarify, I am not trying to scrape data and avoid showing ads from the site I am using to generate the results. I am wanting to pass the ISBN number to the page and have it search and display the resulting page in the phone's browser. I am also fine with a method that would populate the search field and the user would have to hit the search button if that can be accomplished easier.
I would recommend abandoning this route, as it is highly unlikely that the owners of this website will want you passing a query string to their site anyway, but rather they will most likely point you to an Application Programming Interface (API) that they provide, so that your program can connect to this service (free or paid, depending upon the company) and then you can request the book's details by providing the ISBN in the request.
There is no discovery mechanism for an .aspx page like there is for a web service to find out the names of things to pass. Even if you figure out what the name of the query string is that you could pass in for ISBN, you run the risk of the implementation being changed and your "application breaking". While this is also true of web service APIs, since APIs are the route the website providers want you to use, as opposed to screenscraping, then they generally inform their users of breaking changes or newer versions of the API via documentation.
From what I can see that page does not accept URL-variables for their search field the way google.com and other does. The page is generated through some sort of content management system (CMS) and it relies heavily on javascript to make things work. I tried doing a normal search there, and you have two issues you need to wriggle around.
First, the page redirects you to a page where you select if your a student, parent etc. It seems that it relies on some session cookie to remember the setting, but it times out pretty fast.
Second, the form uses javascript to trigger the search, and it appears to be done using AJAX, a method of using javascript to trigger actions on the server and displaying the results, without actually loading the page again. You might be able to get a hold of the javascript code used and re-engineer it for your purposes, and call that using HTTP POST and/or GET from your app, but it is a tricky path, and quite possibly not allowed by the company since you will be loading data from their site, without presenting their advertisements and thus be costing them money.
I am planning to make a desktop application which will have 5 regional newspapers and the user can select either of them to read it.
I need seperate colums such as Opinion,Editorial,Breaking News,Sports,etc. which means I need data of their every column.
But when I visited few papers' websites,they are just giving the headline, one line description and a link to read more as xml feed.On clicking the link the user is directed to their website.
I have seen many android applications like news Hunt ,World news,etc , which show the entire content.How do they do it?Are they using any backdoor or hack or something?
Use Jaunt Api .
The Api has easy-to-learn structure and also the code is efficient as well as fast.
You should give it a try.
Try to use a third service like
http://import.io/ or http://www.mozenda.com
As you said apps like Flipboard, Breaking news sport etc are based on services like import.io
With this you can transform information from the web into usable data easily !
Some of this app used JSON in retrieving the content from the web and pass into android app. check this link
They use an API that allows them to retrieve news (load from a server).
For example yahoo, google, etc
Not tested yet but it works (I'm sure) see yahoo API
In your case, You should write another view to display news details according to the news ID: Read their documentation carefully
Some Websites will write their own public API, which everyone can access with some HTTP header values sent. After sending HTTP request, they return the response in XML / JSON formats which you have to parse them inside your Android app and produce them on UI.
If in case they do not provide any API as such, then you need write a server side Crawler which crawls and parses the information(HTML Tagged information) from their websites and store them. Again then you need to write your own Web services(RESTful / SOAP) that send the parsed information to Android app via URL's or something.
This can be achieved using RSS feed.
visit here and see page source, here you can get all news in item tags like this
<item>
<title>..</title>
<description>...</description>
</item>
where each item tag is for each news, you can fetch both title and description from there.
and you can get data from any link using HTTPPOST or HTTPGET mehods