Don’t read any further if you dislike techy talk or mild complaining.
I have a large Amazon wish list of 550+ books, and it gets pretty darn difficult when I’m in a real-world book (print rules!) store and need to check if the store has a book on the list. There’s no option to “see all” entries, so I have to schlep through the pagination—it’s up to around 26 pages now—to see if something is on the list. There’s no option to export it and download and too compound the roadblocks, Amazon had disabled their public API for their wish lists some time ago, so I couldn’t even write a script to grab any data. What to do?
I used doitlikejustin’s Amazon Wish Lister to scrape the data. I grabbed the XML and exported it to an Excel document using an online converter, but for some reason each entry on the list had their own sheet on the document, instead of just listing them in rows on the same sheet. I was looking into how to compile them all into one sheet when I realized only half of the entries exported.
Back to square one. I searched around some more and found Andy Langton’s Amazon Wishlist Exporter. It worked well and I could sort it by title, and it had options to export, but I really just wanted the HTML. There was no option to view all except in the print view, so I was able to grab the HTML from that, but with a lot of unnecessary tag attributes and styling, not to mention it was minified. I used zubrag.com’s HTML stripper to clean it up, then Dirty Markup to de-minify for readability.
Another issue, but one easily remedied: I just needed the title and author, and the print page included a lot of extraneous info columns. jQuery to the rescue—just had to hide some of the table cells in each row, and that was that. I have it uploaded to my server space as a plain text HTML
The only issue I really have now is that the HTML file crashes the native editor on my server space, I think because of its size…though it’s not unusually large—remember that I stripped all of the style declarations and attributes. So for now I have to download the file from my server, edit it locally, and re-upload it.