How do craigslist mashups get data? [closed]

Answer 1

For AdRavage.com I use a combination of Magpie RSS (to extract the data returned from searches) and a custom screen scraping class to properly populate the city/category information used when building searches.

For example, to extract the categories you could:

//scrape category data
$h = new http();
$h->dir = "../cache/"; 
$url = "http://craigslist.org/";

if (!$h->fetch($url, 300)) {
  echo "
There is a problem with the http request!
";      
  exit();
}

//we need to get all category abbreviations (data looks like: community)
preg_match_all ("/([^`]*?)\n/", $h->body, $categoryTemp);

$catNames = $categoryTemp['2']; 

//return the array of abreviations
if(sizeof($catNames) > 0)   
    return $catNames;   
else
    return $emptyArray = array();