BookScraper 📚

BookScraper is a Python command-line tool that scrapes book titles and prices from Books to Scrape. It allows you to fetch books from a specific category and save the results in a well-formatted text file or a structured JSON file.

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🔧 Features

• Scrapes book titles and prices by category
• Uses requests, BeautifulSoup, re, and tabulate for web scraping and formatting
• Saves results in either .txt (pretty table) or .json format
• User-friendly and interactive command-line interface
• Supports UTF-8 encoding for file outputs

📦 Requirements

Make sure you have Python 3.6+ installed. Then, install the required libraries:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 tabulate

🚀 Usage

Run the script in your terminal:

python book_scraper.py

You will be prompted to:

1. Enter the book category you want to scrape (e.g., travel, humor, novels, etc.).
2. Choose whether to save the results as a .txt file.
3. Choose whether to save the results as a .json file.

🧠 Notes

• If the category name has two words, use a dash - between them. Example:

  • ✅ science-fiction
  • ✅ historical-fiction

• The category name must exist on Books to Scrape.

• Important: You must set your own User-Agent inside the script before running it.
  To do this, replace the user-agent field inside the headers dictionary with your real browser's User-Agent string.

Example:

headers = {
    'user-agent': 'your actual User-Agent here'
}

Tip: To find your User-Agent, you can visit https://www.whatismybrowser.com/ and copy the string.

• The script will not work without a valid User-Agent.

📁 Output Examples

📄 Text file (TXT):

Type: travel
Date: 27/04/2025
================================================

╒════════════════════════════════╤════════════╕
│ Title                          │ Price      │
╞════════════════════════════════╪════════════╡
│ It's Only the Himalayas        │ £45.17     │
│ Full Moon over Noah's Ark      │ £49.43     │
│ See America: A Celebration...  │ £48.87     │
╘════════════════════════════════╧════════════╛

🗂️ JSON file:

[
  { "Title": "It's Only the Himalayas", "Price": "£45.17" },
  { "Title": "Full Moon over Noah's Ark", "Price": "£49.43" },
  { "Title": "See America: A Celebration...", "Price": "£48.87" }
]

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.