RECIPE4U: An Android Application Using Web Scraping

Abstract

Cooking is a daily activity that some people do. To do so, some people might need to refer to recipes. However, it is sometimes difficult and time consuming to find the right recipe, especially local Malaysian dishes. Although there are solutions such as apps to quickly search for recipes were developed, existing apps and solutions seem to lack the feature to suggest recipes to the user based on their preferred ingredients. This project aims to develop a new mobile recipe application, called Recipe4U using web scraping framework where this application is expected to suggest recipes based on the user’s preferred ingredients. The app will include Malaysian dishes recipe with both English and Malay language selection. The project implemented regular expression to search the ingredients based on the keywords entered by the user. This project uses Android Mobile Application with Java language and a web scraping application scripts in R language and SQLite database for recommender function. The user acceptance test results proved that this project is well accepted by the end users. A survey was conducted on app’s acceptance test with 83 respondents, to obtain their feedback on the app’s functionality and usability. Based on the survey, 89% of the respondents are very satisfied with the overall function of the app. For future work, more sources of the recipes will be added, recipe sharing, and bookmark feature will be implemented to improve the usability of the app.