Monday, May 23, 2011

Craigslist Car Finder

I bought my first car in 2006 through Craigslist.  Searching for a used car  on Craigslist was a pain -- there was too much junk.  I found myself wasting 2-3 hours every day sifting through craigslist postings looking for good deals. So I wrote script to automatically parse craigslist car ads and show me only the ones that may be of interest to me.   This script helped me and at least four of my friends find a great deal. on Craigslist.  Hope it is useful to you too.

The script has the following features:
  • Allows you to look for only specific car models.
  • Allows you to ignore coupes.
  • Allows you to specify price and year range.
  • Allows you to ignore manual transmission cars.
  • Compares the price of the vehicle with the Edmunds True Market Value price and highlights good deals.
  • Highlights car with low miles.
Here is the script: craigslist.tar.gz.

In 2006, PERL was the only scripting language I knew. It was an absolute horror to do object oriented programming in PERL.  I wish I knew Python and Ruby back then.

If you find the script useful or find bugs, please do send me an email.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello,

I'm working on something very similar. Do you think you would want to work on a project that is similar?

Unknown said...

Since your email address is unknown in the comment, I have no way to reply to you in private. Could you please send me an email at my gmail address : dilip dot antony dot joseph ?