Google Play Search

This is a simple module for scraping the Google Play search since there really isn't an API for it. There are several additional pieces of information that could be scraped and added to this.

About

Currently, the following items are available for searching apps, books and movies in the Google Play store.

• Item name (name)
• Description (description)
• Url (url)
• Price (price)
• Thumbnail (thumbnail)
• Banner Icon (banner_icon)

Hopefully in the future, this will pull in the ratings and links to screenshots.

Also, this currently only pulls the results from the first page. Reason is this is used to find information for an item and not for displaying search results.

Installation

Note: Beautiful Soup is required for scraping the HTML.

python setup.py install

Usage

Examples for how to use this.

For importing the module

from google_play import GooglePlay

Initialize the object

The default media type is 'apps'. So far, only apps, books, and movies can be searched.

app_search = GooglePlay(search='angry birds', media='apps')
book_search = GooglePlay(search='The Hobbit', media='books')
movie_search = GooglePlay(search='Casablanca', media='movies')

All results from first page

g = GooglePlay(search='angry birds')
g.get_first_page()

Get first item in the search

g = GooglePlay(search='angry birds')
app = g.get_first()

Access the attributes for an item

Please refer to the about section of this file to see what fields are available.

g = GooglePlay(search='angry birds')
app = g.get_first()

app.name
app.thumbnail
app.description

Note: Description is a field that is only on the details page. Since it may not be needed, the details page is not fetched unless the attribute is called. This saves a lot of page calls.