Off Topic - Historical Data

[GeorgeUK]

Not related to BT directly, so apologies for this.

Does anyone use Betfair's Historic Data?
And if so, can you tell me whether the Event ID is sequential for horse racing?
eg
1001 win
1002 place

and not

1001 win
1002 without fav
1003 place

I'm trying to test whether estimated odds are "close" to the actual Betfair odds, but taking the data from the historical files Betfair produces is a little complicated. It's easy enough to find the "to be placed" market and therefore the Event ID, but need advice on whether the win only market (which has no description i can actively search for) is always 1 Event ID number off the place market.

Does anyone know?

thanks
George

[Pug Munter]

George,

And apologies from me too because I don't know the answer to your question but wondered if you could help me out

Whenever I've tried to download the Horse Racing Data, the file is always bigger (probably a lot bigger) than Excels 65000 rows will take, so lots of data is lost.

Is there a way of importing this without losing any of it please?

Many thanks

[dermag]

Hi George,

In the past it hasn't always been the same. I used to run an automated excel sheet which queried [betfair lite] for the win & place markets and I found that 'most' are sequential as you say, but occasionally for whatever reson, usually major meetings they were opposite. IE the win was usually the number before the place, like 10001 and 10002 but then now and then they'd swap it round.

In the end I started parsing their xml page to get exactly what I wanted. I realise this wont work for you using the historical data, which is also incomplete I might add. I just parsed all the place market data for 2006 Jan thru June and as it comes in "weekly" zip files theres usually no data at all for the last day of the week quoted. I queried betfair but their response was the usual....no f*****g answer at all. Very frustrating.

I you have the ability, and I suspect you do in spades, could you not just parse all UK horses both win & place in a basic list and then sort in excel by date/horse. This would put them in the correct default order of Date/Horse/Win price/Place price.

[Mattmid]

Pug Munter

I had the same problem and found a vb script at mrexcel . com that imports it fine across as many sheets as it takes. The script I found there is for text files but if you change the .txt bits to .csv it works fine.

[Pug Munter]

Pug Munter

I had the same problem and found a vb script at mrexcel . com that imports it fine across as many sheets as it takes. The script I found there is for text files but if you change the .txt bits to .csv it works fine.

Superb, many thanks!!!

[GeorgeUK]

I made a workbook that looks at all csv and txt files within whatever folder (and subfolders) the workbook is placed.
http://www.punterslounge.com/forum/show ... hp?t=47965

It's a bit complicated, but i did a full explanation of what it does.

[milfor]

I find no way to look at more than 65000 lines in the betfair historical data.

I tried George's workbook with a non-horseracing-csv. 8 files were created where only the first column is filled.

[MarkRussell]

You can have 1,048,576 rows in Excel 2007.

[milfor]

Thanks for the suggestion. But I have a free student version of Excel 2002. I would have to buy Excel 2007 and that would be quite expensive.

[mclarens]

u should be able to get a free file splitter online.

then u can break up the .txt or .csv files separately say a 60mb file
break up into 20 files say.

very time consuming and cumbersome.

but ..... in the context of what is being thrown up a solution.