A flight information scraper for Carnival cruises
This is not production code -- it's just a small tool I wrote to help myself optimize a painful search process and I wanted to share it with others. PLEASE DOUBLE CHECK ALL DATES, TIMES, AIRPORTS, ETC. BEFORE ORDERING ANY FLIGHTS. If you order the wrong flight for your cruise, I don't take any responsibility.
Trying to order a cruise is a pain mostly because the price consists of two main components: the cruise fare and the flight. Trying to search for both of these in an organized fashion usually requires 3 windows: the cruise page, the flights page, and a spreadsheet. Furthermore, having to manually pick out flights that land in the morning (so you have time to get to the port) and leave in the afternoon (so you have time to get to the airport) is a pain.
Enter HODOR (see http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Hodor if you don't understand the reference). Hodor is not particularly clever, but he will make your life easier by fetching flight information for a particular cruise and putting it right into the page. The hope is that now you only need two windows -- the cruise page and your spreadsheet and no more typing in silly dates and airport codes.
First, you'll want to grab the source code and adjust the variables in bg.js (for the moment they are kind of spread out, but the main ones are in the generate_google_flights_url() function like your airport and time filters.
Then, open a new tab and navigate to chrome://extensions. Enable the developer mode and click "load unpacked extension". Navigate to the source folder and open it. Now, you should have Hodor in your tool bar. If you click the arrow next to hodor in the extensions list and click "_generated_background_page.html" -- a developer tools window should come up. Click on the console tab and make sure that there's a log message that reads: "hodor bg page loaded". If so, you're ready to use Hodor to do your bidding.
Open a carnival page and do a search for cruises. When you're on the search results page, click the hodor button and a bunch of links should come up under each result.
Clicking a link will trigger a google flights page to open. 2 seconds later, the flight information will be returned to the page. Please heed the warning below.
I'm releasing the code under GPLv3. See the LICENSE and COPYING files for the GPLv3 notices.
Well, you've found the source code, so you're well on your way. The main trigger point is the last few lines of bg.js. content.js is injected into the carnival search results pages and content_gflight.js are injected into the google flights pages. They communicate back and forth via bg.js. All of the page modification and scraping is done via jQuery -- which is an excellent tool if you're not afraid of functional programming.
The code shouldn't be all the hard to decipher because there's not that much of it. Happy hacking.