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Scraping iTunes part iii – reading the categories list

My last post on scraping the iTunes store showed how to read the categories page. We had a URL something like this:
http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/browse?path=/36/6081/1/
(for books). Sending that in produces a large xml response – the interesting parts look like this:

<dict>
<key>artistId</key>
<integer>293260414</integer>
<key>artistName</key>
<string>Saxorama.net</string>
<key>buy-only</key>
<true/>
<key>buyParams</key>
<string>
productType=C&salableAdamId=294770918&pricingParameters=STDQ&price=0&ct-id=14
</string>
<key>genre</key>
<string>Productivity</string>
<key>genreId</key>
<integer>6007</integer>
<key>itemId</key>
<integer>294770918</integer>
<key>itemName</key>
<string>EasyWriter</string>
<key>kind</key>
<string>software</string>
<key>playlistName</key>
<string>EasyWriter</string>
<key>popularity</key>
<string>0.13890815</string>
<key>price</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>priceDisplay</key>
<string>Free</string>
<key>releaseDate</key>
<string>2009-04-06T07:00:00Z</string>
<key>s</key>
<integer>143441</integer>
<key>softwareIcon57x57URL</key>
<string>

http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r30/Purple/40/ce/15/mzl.dtewfrse.png

</string>
<key>softwareIconNeedsShine</key>
<false/>
<key>softwareSupportedDeviceIds</key>
<array>
<integer>1</integer>
</array>
<key>softwareVersionBundleId</key>
<string>net.sax.easywriter</string>
<key>softwareVersionExternalIdentifier</key>
<integer>1589121</integer>
<key>softwareVersionExternalIdentifiers</key>
<array>
<integer>875361</integer>
<integer>1472572</integer>
<integer>1486886</integer>
<integer>1589121</integer>
</array>
<key>url</key>
<string>

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=294770918&mt=8

</string>
</dict>

This is a set of summary details for one product, and there will be up to 3500 of them on the page that we just downloaded. While the information here is useful, we need to go to another page to get the complete set of information for the produce. We do this by extracting a URL using an xpath statement, which I will post next time.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Scraping iTunes part iii – reading the categories list”

  1. kreisel.ray says:
    February 9, 2010 at 1:00 pm

    This tool grabs the descriptions with screenshots available
    http://www.appstoresdk.com

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