Scraping iTunes App Store part iv – reading application details
So we now have the page containing all (or the first 3500) applications for each category. To read details of individual apps I used the following XPath query -
/*[name()='Document']/*[name()='View']/*[name()='ScrollView']/*[name()='VBoxView']/*[name()='View']/*[name()='MatrixView']/*[name()='MatrixView']/*[name()='VBoxView']/*[name()='VBoxView']/*[name()='TextView']"
Each node of this contains a long list of name/value pairs as shown in my previous post. Some of the fields are:
- artistId – The unique id of the app developer
- artistName – A string containing the name of the developer.
- genre – the name of the genre to which the app is assigned
- genreId – the numeric id of the genre
- itemId – the unique id used to identify the app throughout iTunes
- itemName – the name of the app
- kind – always “software”as far as I can see
- popularity – a ranking indicator. Not quite sure how this is calculated right now
- price – the price in tenths of a cent
- priceDisplay – the price as a formatted string
- releaseDate
- softwareIcon57×57URL – the URL of the app’s icon
- url – the URL to view the app in iTunes
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