Alfred workflow from Numbeo Cost of Living Comparison Calculator

[jhinden]

Anyone know how one might go about making a script to use this site to compare cost of living in different cities? Handy for freelancers working on the go.

www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp


 

[deanishe]

The API is simple enough.

 

You can get the names and IDs of cities via the autocomplete API:

http://www.numbeo.com/common/CitySearchJson?term=london

This returns JSON:

[
    {
        "label": "East London, South Africa",
        "value": "1683"
    },
    {
        "label": "London, Canada",
        "value": "2352"
    },
    {
        "label": "London, United Kingdom",
        "value": "6512"
    },
    {
        "label": "London, KY, United States",
        "value": "9196"
    },
    {
        "label": "Londonderry, United Kingdom",
        "value": "6513"
    }
]

Then pass two of those ID numbers to this URL:

http://www.numbeo.com/common/dispatcher.jsp?city_id1=1683&city_id2=6512

At this point, you can either take the easy route of opening that URL in the browser, or the harder route of extracting data from the HTML to show in Alfred.

[jhinden]

Thanks for the response. I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to do much with that though. I tried that link for example in the browser and it doesn't work. 

 

Please forgive my ignorance, but perhaps I can ask question that is a bit more general that will help me with Alfred: 

How can I create a search workflow that has two or more input queries in Alfred? Does this require scripting? 

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1={INPUT COUNTRY 1}&country2={INPUT COUNTRY 2}&city1={INPUT CITY 1}&city2={INPUT CITY 1}

 

Typinator has a nice method for doing this (without scripting) and I guess I can just use that, but was hoping to be able to do something like this in Alfred where I simply type:

Compare COL Berlin Germany San Francisco California

 

Thanks in advance. 

[deanishe]

Alfred only works with one input, so you're probably going to have to do some scripting to get around that.

 

In the simplest case, you could say "the input format is |country 1|city 1|country 2|city 2" and then split the single input on |

 

If you follow my tutorial for a Pinboard workflow (creating the workflow, installing the library etc.) and use this Python script instead of  pinboard.py, it should do, basically, what you want. 

#!/usr/bin/python
# encoding: utf-8

"""
Script Filter for Alfred 2 and Alfred-Workflow library.

Compare cost of living in two cities.

Save as `numbeo.py` in your workflow directory and create
a Script Filter with
    Argument = required
    Language = /bin/bash
    Script = /usr/bin/python numbeo.py "{query}"
"""

import sys

from workflow import Workflow, web

log = None

API_URL = u'http://www.numbeo.com/common/CitySearchJson'
WEB_URL = u'http://www.numbeo.com/common/dispatcher.jsp?city_id1={}&city_id2={}&where=http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp'
DELIMITER = u'⬌'


def search_city(query):
    """Search for cities."""
    r = web.get(API_URL, {'term': query})
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()


def comparison_url(first_id, second_id):
    """Return URL for webpage comparing the two cities."""
    return WEB_URL.format(first_id, second_id)


def main(wf):
    """Run workflow."""
    first_id = None
    query = wf.args[0]

    if DELIMITER in query:
        first_id, query = [s.strip() for s  in query.split(DELIMITER)]

    for city in search_city(query):
        if city['value'] == first_id:
            continue

        if first_id:
            url = comparison_url(first_id, city['value'])
            wf.add_item(u'Compared to {}'.format(city['label']),
                        url,
                        valid=True,
                        arg=url)

        else:
            wf.add_item(city['label'],
                        autocomplete=u'{} {} '.format(city['value'], DELIMITER))

    wf.send_feedback()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    wf = Workflow()
    log = wf.logger
    sys.exit(wf.run(main))

Connect that Script Filter to an Open URL Output. Edited October 22, 2015 by deanishe

[jhinden]

Cool, thanks so much! Looks like good info on that site. Thank you!