Automated craigslist job search with Perl and Bash
Posted: March 30, 2012 Filed under: Operating Systems, Programming Languages | Tags: Bash, Linux, Mac OS X, Perl Leave a comment »Most of my students are in the job market and after suggesting them websites where they could look for jobs, I took a peak at craigslist. I like craigslist; its a simple, bare-bones website with pure text. However, the search functionality is a bit awkward, and it is hard to find a good match between the candidate skills and a particular job posting. If you are seriously looking at every single “filtered” post, it may still take you over an hour to look for the best skill-to-job matches. So I created two scripts, one in Perl and the other one in Bash, that scavenge all the job postings for skill matches, and create a new webpage with all the appropriate positions and matched skills in a ready to click link. Data mining at its best!
There are some “limitations” of these scripts. First of all they were only tested in macOSX and Linux, however I am sure you can convert them quite easily to Windows. Secondly, I’ve focused all the craigslist searches around New England. You may add other craigslist locations quite easily by following the instructions on the perl script.
This automated job search requires two files: search_jobs.sh and craigslist.pl. Both can be found below, or at my github repository. To run the code place both files in the same directory, and edit the search_jobs.sh, shown below, with a text editor (after emacs, my second favorite text editor is TextWrangler). In this file modify the appropriate keywords that are being assigned to the variable SEARCH_SKILLS. Currently the search skills are the standard qualifications for an engineering graduate.
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#!/bin/bash ################################################################################# #Functions (do not modify anything here) ################################################################################# SEARCH_SKILLS="" function search_jobs { SEARCH_NAME=${1} perl craigslist.pl ${SEARCH_SKILLS}> raw_data.txt #create the header of an html file echo "<html><title>Job Search Results</title><body>" > job_data.html #sort the entire file contents and make sure the best matches are on top sort -t! -n -r -k3 raw_data.txt >> job_data.html #clean up the file perl -p -i -e "s/!/\ \ \ \ \ \ /g" job_data.html #terminate the html file echo "</body></html>" >> job_data.html mv job_data.html ${SEARCH_NAME}.html rm -f raw_data.txt } ################################################################################# #You may modify your skills below ################################################################################# SEARCH_SKILLS="embedded, circuit, transistor, VLSI, firmware, RTOS, kernel, MacOSX, JTAG, oscilloscope, HDL, FPGA, Arduino, MSP430, OMAP3540, micro-controllers, microcontrollers, SVN, programmer, Perl, linux, Mathematica, LabVIEW, schematics, Verilog, VHDL" SEARCH_NAME="engineering" search_jobs ${SEARCH_NAME} SEARCH_SKILLS="quantitative, mathematica, finance, programmer, developer, high-frequency, fpga, microcontroller" SEARCH_NAME="finance" search_jobs ${SEARCH_NAME} |
This script runs with the following command line:
./search_jobs.sh
Running the scripts on a macosx terminal window.
After it is done executing it will create two files engineering.html and finance.html, where the candidate can see his best job matches.
Two html files are created with the best job matches
Generated HTML file with the best job matches
Below is the Perl script that parses the craigslist job postings.
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#This script fetches the last 2 days new job postings from craigslist that match #a specific criteria and reports the URLs that correspond to that match. #The search criteria comes from the input arguments. The cragislist sites #are hardwired to the New England area. You may change them by manually #altering the variables in Section #3. # #Version 0.2 30/march/2012 #Author: Nuno Alves # ############################################################################# #Section #1 - load libraries ############################################################################# use strict; use POSIX; use LWP::Simple; ############################################################################# #Section #2 - input arguments are your skillsets ############################################################################# my $num_args = $#ARGV + 1; if ($num_args == 1) { print "You must add some skills as arguments\n"; exit; } ############################################################################# #Section #3 - defining variables ############################################################################# #what cragislist sites my @search_site=("http://boston.craigslist.org","http://nh.craigslist.org","http://maine.craigslist.org","http://burlington.craigslist.org","http://westernmass.craigslist.org","http://worcester.craigslist.org"); #type what positions you are looking for (egr = engineering, sof = software) my @positions=("egr","sof","bus","acc"); #this array contains the arguments which are your resume skills my @skills=@ARGV ; ############################################################################# #Section #4 - debug code ############################################################################# #instead of work on every single URL, setting $debug=1, will just scan #two webpages my $debug=0; my @debug_urls=("http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/egr/2902012136.html","http://boston.craigslist.org/bmw/egr/2929181526.html","http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/egr/2926742528.html"); ############################################################################# #Section #5 - subroutines for collecting craigslist data ############################################################################# sub collect_job_posting_http { my $url=$_[0]; my $content = get $url; #print $content . "\n"; my @splitcontents=split(/<h4 class=\"ban\"/,$content); my $size_splitcontents=@splitcontents; my @url_data=(); for (my $i=1 ; $i<$size_splitcontents ; $i++) { #just want the last 2 days of postings if ($i<3) { #print "============\n\n\n"; #print $splitcontents[$i] . "\n"; #get all the posting urls for this particular day my @postingdata=split(/<p><a href=\"|\">/,$splitcontents[$i]); for (my $j=0; $j<@postingdata ; $j++) { #print ">>[$j]>>" . $postingdata[$j] . "<<<\n"; if ($postingdata[$j]=~m/^http/) { push(@url_data,$postingdata[$j]); } } } } return(@url_data); } sub extract_date { my @url_data=$_[0]; my @date_data=split(/Date: 2012-|EDT<br>/,$url_data[0]); return("2012-" . $date_data[1]); } ############################################################################# #Section #6 - main program: collecting http data for each job posting ############################################################################# my @urls=(); if ($debug == 0) { for (my $k=0;$k<@search_site;$k++) { for (my $z=0;$z<@positions;$z++) { my $base_url=$search_site[$k]."/".$positions[$z]; my @tmp_data=collect_job_posting_http $base_url; push(@urls,@tmp_data); } } } else { @urls=@debug_urls; } #foreach (@urls) #{ # print $_ . "\n"; #} ############################################################################# #Section #7 - check if each posting matches at least one skill ############################################################################# my @matched_skills=(); my @skill_type=(); my @post_date=(); for (my $i=0 ; $i<@urls ; $i++) { my $url=$urls[$i]; my $content = get $url; my $counter=0; my $date; # print $url . "\n"; # print $content . "\n"; my $skill_type_desc=""; for (my $k=0; $k<@skills ; $k++) { if ($content =~ m/$skills[$k]/i) { $counter++; $skill_type_desc = $skill_type_desc . $skills[$k] . " "; } } push(@matched_skills,$counter); push(@skill_type,$skill_type_desc); push(@post_date,extract_date($content)); } ############################################################################# #Section #8 - print results to the screen ############################################################################# for (my $i=0; $i < @matched_skills ; $i++) { if ($matched_skills[$i]>0) { print "<li><a href=\"$urls[$i]\">site #$i\<\/a\>" . "!" . $post_date[$i] . "!" . $matched_skills[$i] . "!" . $skill_type[$i] . "\n"; } } |
