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Question

How Can I Extract Website "Store Locator" Data

Oct 6, 2011 7:36AM PDT

Hi - I am looking to extract locator data from this websiteinto a flat file (csv for example). The web page says there are 28,000 locations (records).

The on-screen locator does not allow just selecting a state (that would be fairly easy with 50 states) and limits the max results to 100. The biggest chunk of data I can get at one time is by zip code, but I would have to know every US zip code, which I don't and even doing it that way would probably result in thousands of duplicates as I would be over-lapping zip codes.

Is there any web scraper or similar free utility that would be able to extract this data... with minimal or no duplicates?

Thanks for any ideas! Happy

Discussion is locked

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Answer
My idea.
Oct 6, 2011 7:46AM PDT

Ask them to send the file to you.

Kees

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No Joy
Oct 6, 2011 11:48AM PDT

I should have mentioned... I already tried that, no response.

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Re: no joy
Oct 6, 2011 5:22PM PDT

The problem is it's not on their website nor in the webpage, but it's in their database. And they only give access to that through that page.

So all you can do: write a nice program to loop through those 99999 possible 5 digit USA zip-codes, do the html get, analyse the page that comes back and store the results in your own database for further processing. A nice assignment for a programming course.

Kees

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Beyond Me
Oct 6, 2011 9:44PM PDT

Thanks for the suggestion. Even if I did know how to do what you suggest (which I don't) the number of duplicates would be enormous because of the zip code overlap. Confused I agree that what I am really asking for is access to their database behind the webpage, but if they won't even respond to my inquiries...

That's why I'm looking for alternative solutions.

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Once they are in a database ...
Oct 7, 2011 12:33AM PDT

it's elementary to eliminate the duplicates. It's one SQL-statement.

Kees