I threw this together one afternoon as I was frustrated that even though Tesco displays the 'price-per-ml' for things like cans and bottles of Coca Cola, it doesn't let you sort by 'price-per-ml'. So I wrote a quick script that will download an entire sub category of products, extract the data from them, then output them all to a CSV that I can filter/sort myself.

It was easier than I expected (I didn't have to do much scraping) as there is a data-element in the body tag of the page that has all the product detail in json format.

tesco-to-csv.php

<?php
// Download a Tesco category of products to a CSV, so I can sort by price/ml
 
// I tried to do the download with curl/file_get_contents but the Tesco website
// has a load of javascript, so I eventually ended up just using wget to deal with it
 
$sub_category              = "drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks";
$output_file               = "fizzy-drinks";
$output_csv_file           = $output_file.".csv";
$number_of_items_per_page  =  48;  // 48 is the maximum
$max_pages_to_download     = 20; // shouldn't ever be higher than this
$user_agent                = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"; // Tesco/wget wants this
$url                       = "https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/$sub_category/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=$number_of_items_per_page";
 
echo "Downloading $url\n";
// do the first download (so we can calculate how many pages we need to get the rest)
exec("wget -q --user-agent=\"$user_agent\" \"$url\" -O $output_file-1.html");
 
// load the first page we just downloaded from disk
$first_page = file_get_contents($output_file."-1.html");
 
// find the 'Showing x to x of x items' element and use that to work out how many pages
$doc= new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($first_page); // @ to suppress a load of DOM errors on Tesco's badly formatted page
$finder = new DomXPath($doc);
$pages_class = "pagination__items-displayed";
$pages = $finder->query("//*[contains(@class, '$pages_class')]");
$page_text = $pages[0]->nodeValue;
preg_match("/Showing \d+ to \d+ of (\d+)/", $page_text, $match);
 
$total_items = $match[1];
$pages = ceil($total_items/$number_of_items_per_page);
 
if($pages >= $max_pages_to_download)
   exit("Number of pages to download ($pages) exceed max threshold");
 
// download the rest of the pages to disk
for($i=2;$i<=$pages;$i++) {
   $next_url = $url."&page=$i";
   echo "Downloading $next_url\n";
   exec("wget -q --user-agent=\"$user_agent\" \"$next_url\" -O $output_file-$i.html");
}
 
$lines = array();
$lines[] = array('Product Name', 'Tesco URL', 'Brand', 'Price', 'Price per unit', 'Unit Measure');
// read through each of the pages, parse the json and output as csv
echo "Parsing JSON to CSV\n";
for($i=1;$i<=$pages;$i++) {
   $json_id = $i - 1;
   $file_content = file_get_contents($output_file."-".$i.".html");
   $doc= new DOMDocument();
   @$doc->loadHTML($file_content);
   $body = $doc->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0);
   // get all product date on the page in json format (it's a data-attribute of the body element)
   $items = $body->getAttribute('data-redux-state');
   file_put_contents($output_file."-$i.json", $items);
   $json = json_decode(str_replace("&quot;", "'", $items));
   foreach($json->results->pages[$json_id]->serializedData as $val) {
      foreach($val as $product_id=>$item) {
         if(isset($item->product)) {
            $row = array();
            $row[] = $item->product->title;
            $row[] = "https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/".$item->product->id;
            $row[] = $item->product->brandName;
            $row[] = $item->product->price;
            $row[] = $item->product->unitPrice;
            $row[] = $item->product->unitOfMeasure;
            $lines[] = $row;
         }
      }
   }
}
 
echo "Writing CSV\n";
// write all the data to the CSV
$fp = fopen($output_csv_file, "w");
foreach($lines as $line) {
   fputcsv($fp, $line);
}

php tesco-to-csv.php
Downloading https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=48
Downloading https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=48&page=2
Downloading https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=48&page=3
Downloading https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=48&page=4
Downloading https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/drinks/fizzy-and-soft-drinks/all?sortBy=price-descending&count=48&page=5
Parsing JSON to CSV
Writing CSV