Scraping race results from a website

[hughsiepops]

Is it possible to scrape racing results from a website.?

I am currently paper trading a couple of greyhound ideas at the moment based on the price of the greyhound at the off. In the evening I come home and then have to manually go through the 50+ selections made each day to check the name of the greyhound V's the results shown on www.thedogs.co.uk and make a manual note of whether the greyhound won or lost the race. I was wondering if it is possible to scrape the results from a site and then automatically compare them to the selections I have recorded in Excel and for the result of each dog to be updated automatically (Ie. W for Won or L for Lost). This would save me a huge amount of time each week.

I do recall reading a post along the lines of something similair to this, but I've been looking for the last 45 minutes and I've been unable to relocate it again to find an answer.!

Is anyone able to point me in the right direction.? Or even advise me if this is possible

Thanks
Hughsiepops

[Captain Sensible]

Without knowing what format your spreadsheets in it's a bit hard to point you in the right direction, If you ist your selction by name rather than trap number the easiest way would be to scrape the betfair results service and just use vlookup function from excel. All the dogs results are list at http://rss.betfair.com/RSS.aspx?format= ... ortID=4339 so it'd be easy enough to use vlookup if you used the dog name rather than trap number and race time

[phrenetic]

Hughsiepops

Do you use IE or Firefox?

If you use Firefox, then I think you can get an add-on called iMacros that you can use to scrape web sites (the add-on version is free, although there is also a commercial package available).

It might be worth a look.

Alistair

[dgs2001]

Hughsiepops

Did you find this code??

I ask because I was involved in the thread where George? Shared it with us , Let me know if you havn't found it and I can help, I have it on a disk somewhere!!

[hughsiepops]

Thanks dgs2001. That would be really useful if you could find a copy.

Not too sure why, but I missed the replies to my original question, so I've not spent much time looking into this. In response to phrenetic I have both Ie and Firefox installed. And I will definately folow up Captain Sensible's idea (I have to pick the excel skills along the way though)

I have DATE, TIME AND MEET, BLANK COLUMN (That I add a .(dot) to that helps me group the meetings by name and not just time), TRAP AND SELECTION NAME, ODDS, X or Blank (X If it won / blank if not) .. then the other selections with the same format

Looks like this ..

30/01/2008, 11:19 HGrn, ., 4. Zigzag Mossley, 4.1, X, 1. Meldrum Pride, 4.8, ,5. Hillcroft Gem 4.8, ,3. Trim Oliva, 6.2, , 2. Prodigy Magpie, 7.2, ,
6. Rathoona Doll, 8.8, ,

30/01/2008, 11:28 Newc, ,2. Murdanielclassic, 4.1, , ,5. Questhouse Netty, 4.7, ,X, 6. Springwood Aim, 4.9, 3. Balerno Emma, 6, ,4. Quick Serve, 7.2, ,1. Whistling Tasha, 9.4, ,


In the meantime I stumbled upon Mr Excels podcasts, and in particular Episode 665 - Scraping Webpages which has proved very useful to show you how the process actually works. I think you should be able to access it from here : http://mrexcel.libsyn.com/media/mrexcel/podcast665.mp4

A copy would be really useful though

Thanks
Hughsiepops

[hughsiepops]

Just to update you .. thanks to Captain sensible's link and a quick word with a 'MI Analyst' on a quiet friday afternoon earlier today I now have everything I need.

Everyone was a winner. He didn't know you could screen scrape data into Excel and I got exactly what I needed to save me 20 minutes everynight

Ps. dgs2001. If you do find that file I would still like to take a look please. I'd like to learn a little bit more on the subject.!

Thanks
Hughsiepops