I have a requirement from a customer who wants me to make an app that looks up the barcode from grocery items and extracts details such as the product name, photo of the product, etc. from a free trusted web site.
I plan to use the b4aZbarBarcodeScanner to read the barcodes. When I get the barcode number, I will do the web site lookup and process the information if it's found on the web site database.
My question is this. Is there a B4A library or class that I can use to extract the information from the web site? If no library exists, can you point me to B4A documentation that demonstrates how to do it?
That will depend on what data the website returns and what format the data is in. If the website has a REST api it may return a JSON string or similar, If not are you planning to scrape the page?
That will depend on what data the website returns and what format the data is in. If the website has a REST api it may return a JSON string or similar, If not are you planning to scrape the page?
This is the first time trying this so I would like to find out the easiest way to do it. I took a look at scraping and saw several companies advertising software to extract the data. Is there a B4A scraping library? If not, can you recommend a web site that returns the data in JSON format and a B4A JSON library that contains a sample app so I can see what the coding looks like?
I haven't come across a scraping library but there are several ways you could do it depending on the structure of the page, Which site are you looking at? Have you checked if it has an API?
I haven't come across a scraping library but there are several ways you could do it depending on the structure of the page, Which site are you looking at? Have you checked if it has an API?
I haven't come across a scraping library but there are several ways you could do it depending on the structure of the page, Which site are you looking at? Have you checked if it has an API?
I found a B4A tutorial on extracting data from a JSON text file but would like to know how to extract it from a web page and how to call the web page and get a response from the web site with the JSON data.
I will also try to find other sites that have an API that returns JSON data.
By the way, do you know of a web site that has a free API that returns JSON data for the barcode of grocery products? I already tried searching but only found sites that require money.
It's unfortunate that all of the sites that have what I'm looking for want a lot of money to use their API. I will have to not have bar code scanning in the app and let the user enter the product info by hand. When I did a Google search for free barcode lookup services they all looked like they would do it for free. When I signed up to the sites, and requested the API key, that's when they wanted the money.
If anyone comes across a site with a free API, please let me know.
It takes a lot of time and money to collect the data which you are expecting. So for this nature it will need some money to participate from the work others already did for you.
Your Keywords for research will be GTIN, GS1, EPC, EAN ...
It takes a lot of time and money to collect the data which you are expecting. So for this nature it will need some money to participate from the work others already did for you.
Your Keywords for research will be GTIN, GS1, EPC, EAN ...