The Code

This Perl script, get_friend_IDs.pl, uses an Amazon ID, grabs the HTML of the Friends list, and finds your friends' Amazon IDs.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# get_friend_IDs.pl
# A script to scrape Amazon, retrieve friend IDs, and write to a file
# Usage: perl get_friend_IDs.pl <amazonID>

#Take the asin from the command-line
my $amazonID =shift @ARGV or die "Usage:get_friend_IDs.pl <amazonID>\n";

#Assemble the URL
my $url = "http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-favorites/-/" .
          $amazonID . "/";

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

#Request the URL
my $content = get($url);
die "Could not retrieve $url" unless $content;

my $friends = (join '', $content);

while ($friends =~ m!<b><a href="/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-glance/-/(.*?)/&return;
ref=cm_aya_av.fp_faya/">(.*?)</a></b>!mgis) {
    my($amznID,$name) = ($1||'',$2||'');
    #Print the results
    print $name . " (" . 
          $amznID . ")" .
          "\n\n";
}