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

Actually, the top answer doesn't work if it's something like amazon.com/BlackBerry... (since BlackBerry is also 10 characters).

One workaround (assuming the ASIN is always capitalized, as it always is when taken from Amazon) is (in Ruby):

        url.match("/([A-Z0-9]{10})")

I've found it to work on thousands of URLs.

Answer 2

This worked perfectly for me, I tried all the links on this page and some other links:

function ExtractASIN(url){
    var ASINreg = new RegExp(/(?:\/)([A-Z0-9]{10})(?:$|\/|\?)/);
    var  cMatch = url.match(ASINreg);
    if(cMatch == null){
        return null;
    }
    return cMatch[1];
}
ExtractASIN('http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C/ref=amb_link_86123711_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=0AY9N5GXRYHCADJP5P0V&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=500528151&pf_rd_i=507846');

• I assumed that the ASIN is a 10-length with capital letters and numbers
• I assumed that after the ASIN must be: end of the link, question mark or slash
• I assumed that before the ASIN must be a slash

Answer 3

The Wikipedia article on ASIN (which I've linkified in your question) gives the various forms of Amazon URLs. You can fairly easily create a regular expression (or series of them) to fetch this data using the match() method.

Answer 4

If the ASIN is always in that position in the URL:

var asin= decodeURIComponent(url.split('/')[5]);

though there's probably little chance of an ASIN getting %-escaped.