How would I architect this screenshot -> table tool?

fastai
1

Hi Fast.ai users,

I’ve completed about half of the Fast.ai lecture series, and I’m interested in taking a crack at building for real-world use case I have.

I’m currently shopping for a new project car, so I want to minimize my initial purchase price. My desired method of doing this is:

  1. Enter car info into a table
  2. Analyze the aggregate data
  3. Create a pricing guide for myself
  4. Haggle with sellers armed with superior info

Unfortunately, step 1. does not spark joy. I would far rather prefer to simply screenshot the entire page of cars, and have the data automatically transformed into a table, with no additional input from me.

Screenshot to table
Screenshot to table1837×2177 401 KB

If I wanted to implement this, roughly speaking how would I get started from an architecture standpoint? My goals are

  • Simple codebase → easy to read / maintain
  • Simple infrastructure → easy to read / maintain
  • Suited well for use in a Chrome extension

Since I have only completed part of this course, feel free to point out “obvious” things or explain your thinking granularly. I will not take offense. Positive and critical feedback also appreciated.

Thanks in advance :blush:

2

Hi Toby,

Step 1 is ideally a web scraping problem. Consider using BeautifulSoup library to scrape the data and save them to a csv or a database. It’s really straight forward and easy to work with.

Here’s a freeCodeCamp BeautifulSoup crash course.

Have fun & hope you find a good deal :slight_smile:

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