How can I tell mom when her carbonated drink goes on sale?

Question

I am trying to create funds so that my mom is notified when the Diet Rite drink she buys at Stater Bros goes on sale. My thinking is that I can create a Yahoo Pipe that takes a weekly feed of ads and filters for a string diet ritual. Yahoo Pipe itself is an RSS feed, and so I deliver Pipe to Google Reader, and so my mom will know if Stater Bros is selling a sale.

After seeing how Stater Bros has a searchable PDF from a weekly ad , I thought it would be easy if Yahoo Pipes did a search for It. However, Yahoo Pipes does not support PDF.

Then I decided to transfer the PDF through the online PDF to HTML converter and transfer it to the Fetch Page module in Yahoo Pipes. And in fact, the converter was quite successful , as a result, the resulting HTML saved the text, and I could search for it and find what I needed. However, it turns out that he spits out his data in frames, so I can not use it. I can not find any other PDF to HTML converters.

Even if I was able to get the HTML PDF file from Yahoo Pipes, I’m not sure if it will be useful, as Yahoo Pipes does not provide HTML search / filtering tools. He mainly works on feeds.

So I'm stuck. Any ideas on how to achieve what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

If you are not using it allready then you can look at the Google caching system.

 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.staterbros.com/Images/PDFs/weekly.aspx 

It's not widely known outside of SEO circles, but Googlebot does run a rough PDF file for HTML and text conversion. If you cannot wait for Google to convert the PDF file, there are also several free PHP scripts that can perform the same function.

Since there are no Preg_match equivalents for pipes, you have to work backwards by deleting what is NOT what you are looking for.

The regular expression for the replace module looks something like this: ^ (. +?) Diet Rite (. +?) $ Replace everything from the beginning of the line to the "Diet Rite" with nothing. Then replace everything after "Diet Rite" to the end of the line with nothing.

Therefore, if there is "Diet Rite" on the page, it will be displayed in the pipe and can be added to the RSS feed, otherwise the pipe will return empty.