PHP Woot Checker – Tech, Wine, and Shirt Woot

By  on  

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:

  1. Every day, Woot sells one product.
  2. Once the item is sold out, no more items are available for purchase.
  3. You don't know how many of the item is available and you may only buy three at a time.
  4. The shipping, regardless of product price and quantity, is $5.00.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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

Recent Features

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

  • By
    CSS Selection Styling

    The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page.  We all know that, right?  As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control.  One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.

Discussion

  1. That is cool…

    Now you need to have the script send a txt message to my phone every night at midnight CST.

  2. @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

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!