Big Louie,

I use Visual Basic for the data retrieval and store results in an Access database. The program uses an internet control to download the web page as a html text object and it then searches through to pull out the bits of information I want. The tricky bit is working out how to locate each bit of information you want - basically you have to search for certain HTML strings to locate each item and then strip away all the excess HTML formatting. Each of the three TAB's obviously has to be handled seperately and you also have problems when they decide to change the formatting of their websites - luckily they don't do that very often! Queensland and Tabcorp are good because you can go back several years and get full details for each race, NSW deletes their detail pages at the end of each day so you cant get past history (they only have summary results for past dates). Be warned that there is a lot of data transfer involved so you need an internet connection with unlimited MB data transfer (eg. my effort last night for 11 months of gallops data only from Qld was about 250MB of data transfer).

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson