Scraping eBay Listings with C++ and libcurl in 2023

eBay is one of the largest online marketplaces with millions of active listings at any given time. In this tutorial, we'll walk through how to scrape and extract key data from eBay listings using C++ and the libcurl library.

Setup

We'll need the following libraries installed:

libcurl - for sending HTTP requests to the eBay website

libxml2 - for parsing and extracting data from the HTML of the listings

On Linux, you can install these using your package manager.

We'll also define the starting eBay URL to scrape and a string for the user agent header to spoof a browser visit:

#include <curl/curl.h>
#include <libxml/HTMLparser.h>

const char* url = "<https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=baseball>";

const char* userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 ...";

Replace the user agent string with your own browser's user agent.

Fetch the Listings Page

We'll use the libcurl library to fetch the HTML content from the eBay URL:

CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url);
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, userAgent);

// Perform request and get response
curl_easy_perform(curl);

char* response;
curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_STRING, &response);

xmlDocPtr doc = htmlReadMemory(response, strlen(response), "UTF-8", XML_PARSE_NOBLANKS | XML_PARSE_HUGE);

We set the user agent and then fetch the response string. This is parsed into an XML doc using libxml2.

Extract Listing Data

Now we can extract the key data points from each listing. eBay encloses each in a

with class "s-item__info">. We'll find all of these:

xmlNodePtr root = xmlDocGetRootElement(doc);

xmlNodePtr listingItems[100];
int listingsLen = 0;

for (xmlNodePtr item = root->children; item; item = item->next) {
  if (item->type == XML_ELEMENT_NODE && xmlStrEqual(item->name, BAD_CAST "div") &&
      xmlHasProp(item, BAD_CAST "class") &&
      strstr((char*) xmlGetProp(item, BAD_CAST "class"), "s-item__info")) {

    listingItems[listingsLen++] = item;
  }
}

Then we can loop through each listing node and extract the text or attributes:

for (int i = 0; i < listingsLen; i++) {

  xmlChar* title = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 1);

  xmlChar* url = xmlGetProp(listingItems[i], BAD_CAST "href");

  // And so on for other fields like price, seller etc.

  cout << "Title: " << title << endl;
  cout << "URL: " << url << endl;

  xmlFree(title);
  xmlFree(url);
}

We use xmlNodeListGetString and xmlGetProp to extract info.

Full Code

Here is the full code to scrape and extract eBay listing data:

#include <curl/curl.h>
#include <libxml/HTMLparser.h>

const char* url = "https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=baseball";  

const char* userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36";

CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url);
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, userAgent);

curl_easy_perform(curl);

char* response;
curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_STRING, &response);  

xmlDocPtr doc = htmlReadMemory(response, strlen(response), "UTF-8", XML_PARSE_NOBLANKS | XML_PARSE_HUGE);

xmlNodePtr root = xmlDocGetRootElement(doc);

xmlNodePtr listingItems[100];
int listingsLen = 0;

for (xmlNodePtr item = root->children; item; item = item->next) {
  if (item->type == XML_ELEMENT_NODE && xmlStrEqual(item->name, BAD_CAST "div") &&  
      xmlHasProp(item, BAD_CAST "class") &&
      strstr((char*)xmlGetProp(item, BAD_CAST "class"), "s-item__info")) {
      
    listingItems[listingsLen++] = item;
  }
}

for (int i = 0; i < listingsLen; i++) {

  xmlChar* title = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 1);

  xmlChar* url = xmlGetProp(listingItems[i], BAD_CAST "href");  

  xmlChar* price = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 5);

  xmlChar* details = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 7);

  xmlChar* sellerInfo = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 11);

  xmlChar* shippingCost = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 13);

  xmlChar* location = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 15);

  xmlChar* sold = xmlNodeListGetString(doc, listingItems[i]->xmlChildrenNode, 17);

  cout << "Title: " << title << endl;
  cout << "URL: " << url << endl;
  cout << "Price: " << price << endl;
  cout << "Details: " << details << endl;
  cout << "Seller: " << sellerInfo << endl; 
  cout << "Shipping: " << shippingCost << endl;
  cout << "Location: " << location << endl;
  cout << "Sold: " << sold << endl;

  xmlFree(title);
  xmlFree(url);
  xmlFree(price);
  xmlFree(details);
  xmlFree(sellerInfo);
  xmlFree(shippingCost);
  xmlFree(location);
  xmlFree(sold);
}

curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
xmlFreeDoc(doc);

This provides an overview of scraping eBay listings in C++ using libcurl and libxml2. The key steps are making the HTTP request, parsing the HTML, finding the listing nodes, and extracting the text/attributes.

Scraping eBay Listings with C++ and libcurl in 2023

Setup

Fetch the Listings Page

Extract Listing Data

Full Code

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Scraping eBay Listings with C++ and libcurl in 2023

Setup

Fetch the Listings Page

Extract Listing Data

Full Code

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