PHP Woot Checker – Tech, Wine, and Shirt Woot
If you haven't heard of Woot.com, you've been living under a rock. For those who have been under the proverbial rock, here's the plot:
- Every day, Woot sells one product.
- Once the item is sold out, no more items are available for purchase.
- You don't know how many of the item is available and you may only buy three at a time.
- The shipping, regardless of product price and quantity, is $5.00.
- Every once in a while (usually once a month), Woot has a "Woot-off", where they sell item after item until everything is sold out.
- Even more rare is the "Bag o' Crap." What are you buying? A bag of crap, but that "BOC" could be a laptop bag strap or a big screen TV. Good luck getting through the checkout process though -- BOC's usually take down the server.
- Woot branched out from simply tech products (woot.com) to wine and t-shirts.
Needless to say, Woot is an interesting website. I've created a PHP script that returns the product's name, price, and image.
The Code
//get the page content $woot_content = file_get_contents('http://shirt.woot.com'); //parse for product name $name = get_match('/<h3[^>]*>(.*)</h3>/is',$woot_content); //parse for product price $price = get_match('/<div class="price"><span id="PriceSpan">(.*)<dl class="saleSpecs">/is',$woot_content); //parse for product image $image = get_match('/<div class="saleContainer">(.*?)/>/is',$woot_content).' />'; //parse for product sold out? $sold_out = substr_count(strtolower($woot_content),'sold out!') ? 'Sold Out!' : 'Product Left!'; $content.= '<h1>Product Name</h1>'.$name.'<br /><br />'; $content.= '<h1>Product Price</h1>'.$price.'<br /><br />'; $content.= '<h1>Product Image</h1>'.$image.'<br /><br />'; $content.= '<h1>Product Sold Out?</h1>'.$sold_out.'<br /><br />'; //gets the match content function get_match($regex,$content) { preg_match($regex,$content,$matches); return $matches[1]; }
A few notes about the code:
- You can get the content using the file_get_contents() function or my URL Download Content function. Your preference will depend on your server's security settings.
- You may use the following URL's, depending on the content/product you want:
- http://woot.com
- http://shirt.woot.com
- http://wine.woot.com
That is cool…
Now you need to have the script send a txt message to my phone every night at midnight CST.
@Mark: Shouldn’t you be at the computer already? Hah. There’s also a Firefox plugin that tells you the day’s woot:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4458