Where to start?

[James Goodman]

I regularly (every week) fly for work.

To do this at the moment, I have to manually check the website of the
couriers I use (Primarily Easyjet, BA, BMI).

This is a repetitive task which takes quite a lot of time, so I was thinking
about automating it.

Basically, I need to collect the prices of flights on dates I specify in
order to work out which flights best suit my needs.

Possible?
Any pointers on where to start?

 

[Guest]

Very good question!!!
I have never done anything like that. But I read something about it. Look
int HttpRequest class. You can make a request to their website and parse out
their HTML. Also regular expressions might be some use to you for extracting
data wrapped around HTML tags.

 

[Scott Allen]

Hi James:

You might want to first check if the site offers a web service
interface. If so it might be as easy as "Add web Reference" from the
IDE's Project menu (and then writing a little bit of code to call the
service).

Alternatively, If you google for "screen scraping" you'll find
articles and tips on how to programatically request a web page and
parse information out. In .NET this is generally done with either the
WebClient or HttpWebRequest classes.

HTH,

 

[James Goodman]

Thanks.

How would I know if they have a web service?

 

[James Goodman]

Me neither, & I thought it would be useful!

 

[Scott Allen]

They would have to advertise the service somehow. Amazon and eBay have
a web service interface although they do not advertise the fact on the
front page (because it doesn't appeal to the masses) so you might have
to dig around on the site or send an email. If the site relies on
advertising for revenue, they probably do not expose a service because
it circumvents all the ads.