Tesco Barcode Search is a small script which will search the tesco.com online grocery site for a given barcode and return the da

Tesco Barcode Search is a small script which will search the tesco.com online grocery site for a given barcode and return the data to the console.

As part of what appears to be an obsessive saga - the short but sweet Tesco script has now been modularized, which has also allowed (thanks entirely to the SOAP::Lite collection of modules) for the swift development of a SOAP WebService, which should mean that interfacing with this script is a whole lot easier for anyone using /other/ languages which in turn means - searching tesco.com for barcodes has just become accessible from pretty much any language that’ll happily communicate with the SOAP::Lite webservice handler.

I’m making the module code available below.

Should you want to deploy this as a web service for your own projects and run it within your own environment the next FOUR lines (how preciously succinct perl is) of perl will do the job:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use SOAP::Transport::HTML;
use Tesco; # assuming the Tesco.pm file is in the same directory

SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI->dispatch_to(’Tesco’)->handle;
Save that out within your webroot, here’s some sample client code (again using perl):

Here’s a sample client using SOAP::Lite
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
use SOAP::Lite;
my $tesco = SOAP::Lite
-> uri(’Tesco’)
-> proxy(’http://path/to/the/script/featured/above’);
print Dumper $tesco->searchBarcode($TESCOUSER, $TESCOPASS, $BARCODE)->result;

I’m quite keen to hear from anyone using other languages who’d like to test this (any C# developers want to try adding this as a Web Reference?), drop me a line if you’d like access to the web service I have running.

For those who simply wish to use the module from within Perl, it’s as easy as:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Tesco qw( searchBarcode );
my ($productname, $shelf, $price, $barcode) =
searchBarcode($TESCOUSER, $TESCOPASS, $BARCODE);

As this is still a work in progress (read: I’ve just done the entertaining stuff so far), it’s somewhat lacking….

For example - there is no error checking, need I go on?
Feature wise, this is pretty much it, so I’ll get it fixed up with some of that precious error checking and call it a day with this project.

What's New in This Release:

· The Perl code is now modularized, allowing for the integration of barcode searches from within your own Perl scripts.
· The Web site also includes information about the creation of a SOAP Web service, allowing the use of this code from other languages.