pinging_carGr

A web scraper that monitors car listings on car.gr (Greek automotive marketplace). Tracks advertisement availability over time and detects when vehicles are sold based on HTTP status changes.

Features

• Automated Monitoring - Periodically checks listing availability
• Status Tracking - Records days monitored for each advertisement
• Sale Detection - Identifies removed listings (HTTP 410 status)
• Persistent Storage - Maintains tracking history in text files
• Batch Processing - Monitors multiple listings simultaneously
• Date Tracking - Records when each ad was first added to monitoring

Installation

git clone https://github.com/victord03/pinging_carGr.git
cd pinging_carGr
pip install requests
python src/main.py

Usage

Run the monitoring script:

python src/main.py

Tracking File Format

The system uses a delimited text format:

ad_id$$url$$entry_date$$days_monitored,next_ad...

Status Codes

• 200 (OK) - Listing active, updates monitoring duration
• 410 (Gone) - Listing removed, marks as sold with final duration

Project Structure

pinging_carGr/
├── data/                # Tracking files and scraped data
├── src/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── main.py          # Monitoring logic and HTTP requests
├── test/                # Test scripts
└── README.md

Tech Stack

• Language: Python 3.x
• HTTP Library: requests
• Target Site: car.gr
• Storage: Text-based tracking files

Status

Functional learning project for web scraping practice. Uses HTTP status codes rather than HTML parsing for availability detection.

Note: This is an educational project. Ensure compliance with car.gr's terms of service and robots.txt when using web scraping tools.

License

MIT