Related, there's an iOS app called Mealboard which lets you plan out recipes for the week/month/etc. We've started using it all the time, mostly because it has an amazing in-app browser that scrapes web recipes and stores them in the recipe list. Really impressive tool.
Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
61–70 of 113 posts
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#62This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…
Whenever I read a recipe online I get this nagging feeling that there should be some widely used open standard for describing recipes that can do all sorts of awesome stuff (like a web crawler such as DuckDuckGo being able to answer "I have a pineapple, cream, and the usual pantry basics, what can I cook?"), but this seems to go directly against the business models of the big recipe sites, so it will not likely see m…
There are two ingredient / recipe search engines that work like this
Recipepuppy.com
Foodpairing.ninja
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#63This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…
MyFitnessPal has the same issue where the quantity values mixed between different units, but also between volume(cup) vs weight(grams). So its a pain in the neck to know how heavy a cup of pasta is. I can see the same issue arising with this tool.
A cup of pasta doesn't even compute, since the mass of the pasta will depend so much on the exact shape in question.
You can't substitute a cup of dried tagliatelle (huge "balls of yarn") for a cup of risoni (rice-sized grains of pasta) and be happy after eating that meal. :)
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#64The first recipe I tried gave me an unexpected json error. Seems to only work with a few sites. Cool idea though.
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I read a recipe online I get this nagging feeling that there should be some widely used open standard for describing recipes that can do all sorts of awesome stuff (like a web crawler such as DuckDuckGo being able to answer "I have a pineapple, cream, and the usual pantry basics, what can I cook?"), but this seems to go directly against the business models of the big recipe sites, so it will not likely see m…
I thought once about doing a "flavour graph" where people could go on and add what they thought were good flavours to mix together. The more people added the same flavours, the stronger the edges between nodes would get. I'd probably have to separate it somehow by geographic region, as tastes vary, but in the end you should have a good approximation of "what goes with what".
It's not the same as "what foods go together" but here's a "related flavours" graph I did using research on foods with similar flavour compounds: https://twitter.com/flashman/status/878516648394633216
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#66While I like the idea one of the issues I have run into way too often is the far to many sites are simply linking to the actual site for the recipe. It is getting really difficult to filter these results out as new ones crop up weekly.
example : https://yurielkaim.com/7-green-detox-juice-recipes/
fortunately it doesn't take seven pages to find the actual recipes but I still need to go to each individually and possibly be buried under the ad load. the worst sites spread out the recipes to their own seven pages and still require a link to the site holding the recipe
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#67This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…
Whenever I read a recipe online I get this nagging feeling that there should be some widely used open standard for describing recipes that can do all sorts of awesome stuff (like a web crawler such as DuckDuckGo being able to answer "I have a pineapple, cream, and the usual pantry basics, what can I cook?"), but this seems to go directly against the business models of the big recipe sites, so it will not likely see m…
http://www.supercook.com (Enter ingredients, get recipes)
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#68This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…
This is something I'm working on. I started with a nutrition graph with endpoints for individual foods, units of measure (with mass conversion for volumetric and common units), physical changes (cutting, blending), chemical changes (cooking, fermenting), and nutrient stats.
It's designed as the backend to an NLP interface for describing your recent eating. A food selection composes those endpoints I mentioned; and a recipe is a preset group of food selections. I'm not sure if that's how it should be long-term or how recipe discovery will work, but the goal is an agent that you can talk to about your nutrition intake, food buying, and cooking.
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#69This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…
I tried to build a little recipe DB along these lines years ago. What I ended up finding is that as I improved in my own food preparation skills, my interest in super-rigid recipes of this form diminished.
Basically, there's just a lot of slush and room for experimentation in cooking. Think about making a stir fry— how many people would level off exact masses of different vegetables to combine in perfect proportion? Never! You toss in what looks good and that's that. As you gain confidence, this approach spreads out to cover marinades, sauces, salads, breads, baking, etc, etc. You're not looking at recipes because you intend to follow them exactly, but because you're trolling for ideas of new combinations, or new preparation methods, or whatever.
The prose is valuable, because that's where that subtlety is communicated. It's the author saying stuff like: "I know this sounds weird, but do X until Y and then gently add Z and you'll be surprised what a great flavour develops."
Authors like Mark Bittman and Deb Perelman are perfect examples of this. Sure, you might make the odd thing from them exactly as written, but that's not really why you're there. I think treating food preparation as equivalent to a Vagrantfile would really lose something along the way.
Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
#70It looks good and seems to work with some arbitrarily picked recipes on the usual large recipe websites, although more obscure links cause some bugs¹. Is the source code on GitHub? Are you handling specific websites such as allrecipes.com with bespoke code? Technically the project is interesting, but if you want to offer a commercial API you might run into copyright and fair use issues (as with any scraping tool). No…
I'm actually amazed it manages to scrap minor websites. Scrappers usually have to take in consideration every single website they're targeted at, and they break each time there's a major redesign (or sometimes, a minor one).
@brad0 : how did you manage that? Was thespruce.com in your targets?