Scrape recipe ingredients for pantry tracking

To scrape recipe ingredients for pantry tracking, you need a script or tool that extracts ingredient lists from recipe webpages and organizes them into a structured format (e.g., JSON or CSV). Here’s a Python-based approach using BeautifulSoup and requests, suitable for sites that allow scraping:

python
CopyEdit
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
import json

def scrape_ingredients(url):
    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"
    }
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')

    # Try common classes used by recipe sites
    ingredient_elements = soup.find_all(
        lambda tag: tag.name in ["li", "span", "p"] and 
        ('ingredient' in (tag.get('class') or []) or 
         re.search(r'ingredient', str(tag.get('class')), re.IGNORECASE))
    )

    # Fallback if no specific class found
    if not ingredient_elements:
        ingredient_elements = soup.find_all("li")

    ingredients = []
    for elem in ingredient_elements:
        text = elem.get_text(strip=True)
        if text and any(char.isdigit() for char in text):  # crude filter for quantities
            ingredients.append(text)

    return ingredients

# Example usage:
url = 'https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/24074/alysias-basic-meat-lasagna/'
ingredients = scrape_ingredients(url)

print(json.dumps(ingredients, indent=2))

Key Features

• Ingredient Extraction: Looks for HTML elements likely to contain ingredients.

• Regex Filtering: Optionally refines the search using class names like ingredient.

• Pantry Integration: You can further process ingredients to match against your pantry database (e.g., comparing “1 cup sugar” to inventory).

Optional Enhancements

• Normalize ingredient names (e.g., “1 cup sugar” → “sugar”).

• Use NLP for better parsing (e.g., spaCy, langchain).

• Store results in a database or sync with a pantry app like Grocy.

Let me know if you want this integrated into a pantry tracking system or turned into a web app.