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Find rental listings in Craig's list within certain distance

by johnnywang (Priest)
on Apr 18, 2005 at 07:16 UTC ( [id://448749]=CUFP: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Here's a short script to find all apartment rentals on Craig's list for the San Francisco Bay area, given an address and the distance (in miles). Some notes:
  • You can easily add real-estate listings, room-to-share, etc., by changing the base url in the code
  • You can also use Craig's list for other metropolitan areas, again by changing the base url. I think this only works for US, since it uses google maps to find the latitude/longitude, google maps doesn't seem to have GIS data for other regions.
  • The script takes two arguments: the address (quote it), and the distance in miles. You can easily change the unit by passing the appropriate string to Geo::Distantce.
  • I'm outputting to stdout, you can certainly print to html files to make the links.
  • Like other scraping code, this will need to be updated if either Craig's list or Google maps change their html.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use WWW::Mechanize; use Geo::Distance; use URI::Escape; unless (@ARGV==2){ print "Usage: need to pass the address (in quotes), and the distan +ce.\n"; exit 0; } my $address = $ARGV[0]; my $dist = $ARGV[1]; my $num_pages = 10; # number of craiglist pages to process, be nice! print "\nFinding apartment listings within $dist miles from $address\n +"; my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(); my $google_reg = qr{<point lat="([-\d\.]+)" lng="([-\d\.]+)"/>}; # first, find long/lat for the address using google maps. my $googlemap = "http://maps.google.com/?q=".uri_escape($address); $agent->get($googlemap); my ($my_lat,$my_long) = $agent->content() =~ /$google_reg/i; print "You're at longitude=$my_long, latitude=$my_lat\n\n"; # now crawl craig's list for listings my $geo = new Geo::Distance(); my $site = "http://www.craigslist.org"; my $url = "$site/apa/"; process_page($_) foreach $url, map{$url."index${_}00.html"}(1..$num_pa +ges); exit(0); sub process_page{ my $u = shift; my ($price,$title,$ul,$lat,$long); $agent->get($u); my @links = $agent->find_all_links(url_regex=> qr{/apa/(\d+)\.html +}i); foreach my $link(@links){ if($link->text() =~ /^\s*\$([\d,]+)\s+/i){ $price = $1; $title = $link->text(); $ul = $site.$link->url(); $agent->get($ul); $agent->follow_link( text => "google map"); ($lat,$long) = $agent->content() =~ /$google_reg/i; my $d = $geo->distance('mile',$my_long,$my_lat => $long, $ +lat); if($d <= $dist){ print "price: \$$price\n"; print "distance: $d miles\n"; print "title: $title\n"; print "url: $ul\n\n"; } } } }

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Re: Find rental listings in Craig's list within certain distance
by kesterkester (Hermit) on Apr 18, 2005 at 17:53 UTC

    This is fantastic! A nice job tying together several modules to make a neat tool.

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