scrape ASIN from amazon URL using javascript

Question

Assuming I have an Amazon product URL like so

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C/ref=amb_link_86123711_2?pf_rd_m=ATVP         


        

Answer 1

@Gumbo: Your code works great!

//JS Test: Test it into firebug.

url = window.location.href;
url.match("/([a-zA-Z0-9]{10})(?:[/?]|$)");

I add a php function that makes the same thing.

function amazon_get_asin_code($url) {
    global $debug;

    $result = "";

    $pattern = "([a-zA-Z0-9]{10})(?:[/?]|$)";
    $pattern = escapeshellarg($pattern);

    preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches);

    if($debug) {
        var_dump($matches);
    }

    if($matches && isset($matches[1])) {
        $result = $matches[1];
    } 

    return $result;
}

Answer 2

This may be a simplistic approach, but I have yet to find an error in it using any of the URL's provided in this thread that people say is an issue.

Simply, I take the URL, split it on the "/" to get the discrete parts. Then loop through the contents of the array and bounce them off of the regex. In my case the variable i represents an object that has a property called RawURL to contain the raw url that I am working with and a property called VendorSKU that I am populating.

try
            {
                string[] urlParts = i.RawURL.Split('/');
                Regex regex = new Regex(@"^[A-Z0-9]{10}");

                foreach (string part in urlParts)
                {
                    Match m = regex.Match(part);
                    if (m.Success)
                    {
                        i.VendorSKU = m.Value;
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception) { }

So far, this has worked perfectly.

Answer 3

You can get the ASIN number by getting/scraping that page content and then by getting value of element by id="ASIN". It will work in all the cases and you don not need to rely on regex.

Answer 4

You can scrape ASIN codes from the data-asin attribute in the search results using XPath.

For example $x('//@data-asin').map(function(v,i){return v.nodeValue}) can be ran in Chrome's console.

Answer 5

Since the ASIN is always a sequence of 10 letters and/or numbers immediately after a slash, try this:

url.match("/([a-zA-Z0-9]{10})(?:[/?]|$)")

The additional (?:[/?]|$) after the ASIN is to ensure that only a full path segment is taken.

Answer 6

A little bit of change to the regex of the first answer and it works on all the urls I have tested.

var url = "http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C";
m = url.match("/([a-zA-Z0-9]{10})(?:[/?]|$)");;
print(m);
if (m) { 
    print("ASIN=" + m[1]);
}