[Gllug] Data Sources for Product Prices

[will]

Mike Leigh wrote:
> Has anyone ever looked into this and if so can anyone point me to some
> source code or rss feeds of product prices.

The hardware and software should not be a problem[0], but I suspect you 
will find it difficult to get price data from supermarkets in a machine 
readable form.  I believe they consider this data to be quite sensitive 
as easy access to it could allow their competitors to compete with them 
more effectively.  Also if consumers have access to this information it 
could allow for much faster price comparisons which would drive prices down.

You might have to screen scrape.

Will.


[0] I have a serial bar code reader and it is trivial to get the data 
from.  USB ones might be harder[1].

[1] You could build your own, I think somewhere there is a project to 
read bar codes from digital photographs, although I can't find a URL for 
it so I could be wrong.
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