# Craigslist Lost and Found

## Description

This app is currently deployed here.

Craigslist Lost and Found is a simple app that reads from a Google Sheet that is “published to the web” and can be found here. This Google Sheet uses the built-in function `IMPORTXML` to scrape Craigslist’s Lost and Found listing. You can view the posts listed for any one day and also see the overall number and type of posts.

## Setting up the Google Sheet

1. Find the URL for the web page that you want to collect data from.

- Our example uses http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/laf.

2. Get the XPath expression to scrape the elements you want from the page.

- Our example uses `//span[@class='pl']`.

3. Enter the formula `=IMPORTXML(URL, XPATH_QUERY)` in a cell. Make sure there is a good amount of blank cells to the right or else the data may not fit and an error is thrown. If all goes well, a table of data populates to the right of the formula cell.

Resources on getting the XPath expression: It is useful to see the HTML of the page (eg. in Chrome you can right click -> Inspect Element).

- Web Scraping with Google Sheets and XPath
- Feeding Google Spreadsheets