Now you know how to parse pricing information from a web page—what you do with this information is up to you. If you are so inclined, you can expand your experience with some of the following suggestions.
Since the prices in the example store change on a daily basis, monitor the daily price changes for a month and save your parsed results in a database.
Develop scripts that graph price fluctuations.
Read about sending email with webbots in Chapter 15, and develop scripts that notify you when prices hit preset high or low thresholds.
Build a real procurement system that not only monitors products and prices but also make purchases.
While this chapter covers monitoring prices online, you can use similar parsing techniques to monitor and parse other types of data found in HTML tables. Consider using the techniques you learned here to monitor things like baseball scores, stock prices, weather forecasts, census data, banner ad rotation statistics,[32] and more.
[32] You can use webbots to perform a variety of diagnostic functions. For example, a webbot may repeatedly download a web page to gather metrics on how banner ads are rotated.