# README for coupons
This project exists to make it easy to query the current sale papers for select grocery stores, including specifically Publix.

## Upstream
This project's upstream is at <https://bgstack15.ddns.net/cgit/coupons>.

## Alternatives
Visiting <https://southernsavers.com> manually, or each store's website.

I previously started using selenium (see [aux/ads1.py](aux/ads1.py)) but that was not necessary.

## Reason for existence
To simplify and automate searching for items currently on sale

## Using
Basic usage is pretty simple. You need to specify a store at a minimum. When the script visits the webpage, it will cache the file to `$XDG_CACHE_DIR/coupons/` to reduce the amount of work needed during the same day.

    ./coupons.py --store "publix" --search "candy"

To use standard input from a fully-cached javascript response from the website, you could run this.

    <~/.cache/coupons/publix_2022-09-01.json ./coupons.py --stdin --clean --search "candy" --pretty

An already-cleaned json file would not need the **--clean** flag. But the cached values are the exact javascript+json payload from the server.

See also `./coupons.py --help`.

## Dependencies
A chart for distros, or maybe just a simple package list.

## Building or changing
Only two stores are currently supported. The southernsavers.com website lists other stores that are probably drop-in capable. To learn the widgets.json path needed, use Developer Tools in a web browser to capture the full widgets.json path and add it to the **stores_url** dict.

## References
Developer Tools in Firefox