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
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn&#8217;t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

  • By
    Flashy FAQs Using MooTools Sliders

    I often qualify a great website by one that pay attention to detail and makes all of the "little things" seem as though much time was spent on them. Let's face it -- FAQs are as boring as they come. That is, until you...

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!