Downloading form from Racing and Sports Website?

[aussielongboat]

Racing and sports data:
I use the racing and sports data - but only on an observational basis.

Does anyone have or know of a way to download their form into excel or some other program. It seems quite useful with the Don Scott and other ratings etc.


thanks

Aussie.

[jazzy]

Using a scripting language like Ruby, Perl or (my favourite) Python, the data from just about any site can be extracted. URLs can be constructed by the script to download today's pages. This data can then be stored in a database.

Some sites are harder to do than others, but it's really not rocket science if you know what you are doing. Only problem is sites that change their layout will most likely break the script, and it will need fixing.

If you google rent a coder or similar you'll find a plethora of sites where freelance coders will quote you a price for the job. They would almost certainly do it cheaper than I could :)

[aussielongboat]

thanks jazzy,
i will see what i can do.

cheers

aussie

[jazzy]

'Cause I'm such a nice guy :), here's a quick and dirty Python script I wrote a while ago for a mate of mine... Dunno if he still uses it...

It gets all the worksheets for the day and writes the favourites to a spreadsheet. Note, it is a quick and dirty script, there is no error checking, and if it has a problem with something it raises an exception and closes (default Python behaviour)

If you want to try it out you will need to install Python - get it from http://www.python.org - get 2.7 not 3.x - it is not compatible and pywin32 (for the excel stuff) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/Build216/ - select the right version to match the version of Python you've got.

Anyway, it shows what can be done.

[aussielongboat]

thanks jazzy,
i will have a lash and see what i can up with,
cheers

aussie

[Toil]

'Cause I'm such a nice guy :), here's a quick and dirty Python script I wrote a while ago for a mate of mine... Dunno if he still uses it...

It gets all the worksheets for the day and writes the favourites to a spreadsheet. Note, it is a quick and dirty script, there is no error checking, and if it has a problem with something it raises an exception and closes (default Python behaviour)

If you want to try it out you will need to install Python - get it from http://www.python.org - get 2.7 not 3.x - it is not compatible and pywin32 (for the excel stuff) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/Build216/ - select the right version to match the version of Python you've got.

Anyway, it shows what can be done.

Does anyone know if this get_rands script from jazzy still works or am I not using python properly?

[UselessBettor]

No idea.

I have posted downloads of the data at the end of each month. They are good for research if that is your aim. If you want quick research I have my website which allows you to test certain things from there pages.

If you want a certain system that can't be tested due to the implicity of the site let me know and I will tell you if I can run it manually for you against my database.