UNISA API?

[Agent67]

Hey guys, I want to make a web app for fun, that takes a UNISA course/module code as input and returns multiple links to booksellers (Takealot, Van Schaik, etc.) where you can buy the prescribed book/s for that specific course as well as a table filled with info about the prescribed book/s in question. Does UNISA have a publicly available API? Or how could I access the entered course's info? The best I got after Googling is this: https://www.unisa.ac.za/portal/api (just gives useless XML).

What the link returns:

Thanks in advance for the help!

Kind Regards
PrimeSteak

 

[mjzar]

You could web scrape their website?
I found this page with a quick google search

https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/myunisa/default/Books/Prescribed-Books

 

[Agent67]

You could web scrape their website?

Could be a good idea, I'll try it

 

[slimeball]

That link https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/myunisa/default/Books/Prescribed-Books doesn't appear to work effectively. For example if you go on UNISA's website and have a look at their BSc Computing degree: https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default/Register-to-study-through-Unisa/Undergraduate-&-honours-qualifications/Find-your-qualification-&-choose-your-modules/All-qualifications/Bachelor-of-Science-in-Computing-Computing-(98906-–-COM) and specifically pay attention to their curriculum they list the following modules at 'first level':

• COS1501 - Theoretical Computer Science I
• COS1511 - Introduction to Programming I
• COS1512 - Introduction to Programming II
• COS1521 - Computer Systems: Fundamental Concepts
• INF1505 - Introduction to Business Information Systems
• MAT1503 - Linear Algebra I

However none of these course codes give any results back for prescribed textbooks using the first link meaning that it's likely you will have to source/scrape the information from somewhere else. However if you google 'prescribed textbook for MAT1503' for example you do find a result.

I even tried using the link on other qualifications course codes but they don't seem to return any results which is really weird, so that feature of their website must be broken.

Oh and if you're going to do scraping which involves javascript evaluation, definitely have a look at scraping bee: https://www.scrapingbee.com/. You get free credits and they have a REST API that you can use with Python + BeautifulSoup.