Google-sheets – Unable to import pricing info from toysrus.com into a Google Spreadsheet

google sheetsgoogle-apps-scriptimportxmlxpath

I'm trying to pull live pricing from a given toysrus.com item into a Google Spreadsheet (one item/price per row), and am having no luck whatsoever. Importxml(url, xpath) does not work (similar to the problem encountered with someone scraping from walmart.com here: Import current price from website to spreadsheet). I am not familiar with JavaScript, but I'm wondering if a custom script is my best way forward, or using Curl or some other external script?

I'm pulling the data into a spreadsheet for a given product comparing in stock/out of stock status, and the pricing/stocking status from other retailers. I was able to pull in the pricing data from Target.com rather easily using importxml, but it does not work with Toys R Us. As an example, I'd want to pull in the pricing data from http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=22360626. I can see from inspecting the coding that the pricing appears at

<li class="retail fl "> <span>$39.98</span>

Every method I've tried returns either an error or blank value. I think the extensive use of javascript on the page may be complicating things.

Best Answer

This formula worked perfectly for me:

=IMPORTXML("http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=22360626","//*[@id='price']/ul/li[2]/span")

Related Solutions

Google-sheets – Import current price from website to spreadsheet

The error in your importxml was in the xpath syntax. here is the correct one:

=CONCATENATE(IMPORTXML("http://www.walmart.com/ip/Morton-Sea-Salt-Fine-Salt-17.6-oz/10849552","//*[@itemprop='price'][1]"))

edited: added the [1] at the end of the xpath to prevent the duplicate price.

Google-sheets – Import Price from Gamestop Into Google Sheets

Two things to note - as to why your formula isn't working - 1 being that the syntax is wrong - which i will explain - and 2- which is not your fault - in that the way their populate the data is likely from some framework using templates.

As far as importing your price - I cant guarantee how reliable this will be forever - but i tested it with a few different products and it seemed to always give back the right price -

=TRIM(regexextract(regexreplace(concatenate(IMPORTXML(A1,"//head")),"\n"," "), "(\$\W\d+\S+)+"))

What I am doing above is pulling in the tags from the head section of the site, then using concatenate to join all the tags together.

The regexreplace portion is to remove all the carriage returns and newlines - simply because they annoy me to death, and its impossible to work with a cell that is bigger than what you can see.

 The final regexextract (\$\W\d+\S+) pattern means the following: 

 \$ is an escaped dollar sign, since $ is reserved otherwise to
 mean end of line

 so it looks for that symbol followed by a special character '\W' 

 followed by any digit '\d' 

 and then any characters following up until the next space '\S+'

For your xpath syntax - note that the fact that i used head is actually an edge case - and most sites dont add their data into the meta data of the website - we just got lucky in that one - however for other sites if you wanted to fetch the field using the class name and the h3 element you would instead structure your formula like this:

=importxml("url", "//*[@class='ats-prodBuy-price']")

or 

=importxml("url", "//h3")

although the h3 by itself could easily be annoying as it is likely not the only h3 found on the page in terms of most common scenarios

Lastly I dont have a good explanation as to why the price shows up with an asterisk - or why it loads into the head when i use importxml but is not technically visible in the html itself but there you go

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