www.auctionsieve.com

mac

Highlighting and copying either the URL or the Item # of an ebay auction is supposed to transfer it to the AuctionSieve watchlist. However, this feature only works intermittently for me. I haven't been able to isolate the variable that causes it not to work at times. Does anyone else have this problem?

nev · Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:12 pm Post subject:

Well here's what AuctionSieve does :
- It checks your clipboard once every second.
- Then it looks to see if it's changed since the last time it looked at it
- If it has, it then checks whether it's a piece of text (ie not something like a file or image)
- Then it searches for the text "item=" and throws away anything in front of that
- Then it goes through the string removing all non-numbers - ie "3jh44 8h" would come out as 3448
- Finally it checks whether it's a 10 digit number

Maybe that will help to figure out what's happening.

Spirit · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 14 Jan 2005 Posts: 12

Well, it appears that if you look at all the auctions by a certain seller, then click on one of the displayed auctions by this seller and then copy the resulting URL it won't be transferred to the watchlist.

A possible reason may be that these URLs contain the phrase "item" twice and perhaps your algorithm first finds the second occurrence, resulting in the 10-digit number being cut off? If you manually highlight the 10 digits all is well.

Example: Look up all auctions by one seller, say
[url]http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZsellmatesauction[/url]

Then go to one of his auctions, say
[url]http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-Hewlett-Packard-Scanjet-5100-Cse-Scanner-NEW-NR_W0QQitemZ5850520320QQcategoryZ44978QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem[/url]

Highlight this URL and it won't be transferred to AuctionSieve.

Cheers and a Happy New Year and thanks again for a great program!

nev · Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 4:24 pm Post subject:

Ah - yes, I need to update it since they now use Z instead of =
So I need to check for itemZ.
(And I should change the algorithm such that failing that it just looks for 10 consecutive-digits.)

Spirit · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 14 Jan 2005 Posts: 12

Ah, I just figured out what is happening. Some Ebay URLs simply don't contain the phrase "item=" with an equal sign but just "item" even though they may contain the 10-digit auction number.

See the URL above.

Cheers!

nev · Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 10:55 pm Post subject:

Yeah, ebay changed their urls to get rid of anything that's not a letter, digit, dash or underscore.
= became Z
& became QQ
and I think there was something else but I can't recall it this minute.

Spirit · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 14 Jan 2005 Posts: 12

Well, be careful. Ebay hasn't replaced the = yet, there are URLs with item= and URLs with itemz.

Cheers!