This project is no longer working!

The reason is that mySupermarket have updated their website to require cookies for the "Savvy Buys" pages.

Since I recently started a new job it may be a while before this is fixed :(

Price Search is a program to automate the process of identifying items at a reduced price at the supermarket. It uses Scrapy to crawl the mySupermarket "Savvy Buys" pages, then does a bulk search for items that match the list provided.

With the rise of internet shopping, and in particular the supermarket comparison site mySupermarket, it should be trivial to figure out the cheapest place to shop. mySupermarket automatically keeps track of the total cost of a trolley of goods in each of the main UK supermarkets, and allows you to choose the cheapest at the end.

The problem is that starting with a fixed shopping list and then working out the cheapest way to get it is a poor approximation of the way I actually shop.

My process is almost exactly the reverse of that promoted by mySupermarket. I identify what's cheap/in season first, and only then plan meals and write a shopping list. Also, the vast majority of my shopping is made up of things that I can easily store for a while (such as tinned tomatoes, teabags, pasta, rice, oils, spices, nappies, meat for the freezer, laundry detergent and bathroom products). That means that there are very few things I need to buy in any particular week; the things I choose to buy based on their current price and/or seasonality make up the majority of my shopping.

mySupermarket does provide the necessary data for this (in the form of "Savvy Buys" pages) but not the interface to go with it. The only way to identify good value items is to sift through them manually. This is time-consuming and tedious, so I decided to automate it.

• Python version 2.7
• The Scrapy library
• All Scrapy's dependencies. These are OS-specific and are listed here.

The program can be run from the command prompt or shell with

python main.py <filename>

where <filename> is the name of the input file containing items to search.

For example

python main.py search.txt

Items are separated by line. Multiple words on a line should be separated by spaces. All words on the line must appear in the item title for a match to be found. There is a sample input file provided, search_example.txt.