Any smart 'Techies' out there?

Grumpy_Old_Duffer

Is there a clever 'Techie' out there who might be able to do the following;) .

I want to extract (at this stage) the Football odds, in Euro Odds format, that appear on Betfair, and eventually other Betting Exchanges like Betdaq.

Rather than obtaining the data I want one-team-at-a-time, I want to 'trawl' the Betfair website so that a table is extracted in the format shown below (but with the headings listed across the top), showing ALL the Football Matches down the side, and can then be further analysed by dropping the data into EXCEL, so a .CSV format would be ideal. These 'headings' may be expanded in the future and so might the choosen Sport.

Match
Match Date
Home Odds
Away Odds
Draw Odds
Correct Score Odds (there are 17 of these on Betfair, from 0 - 0 to 3 - 3 plus 'Any Unquoted')

I know Betfair is a 'live' website and is changing all the time, but If I can get a 'snap-shot' every few minutes, that would be perfect.

I know what I want to do with the data once I get it into EXCEL, and I just need to 'perfect' that side of things, but the idea is to gradually move everything into one super-dooper program.

I have the idea but I don't have the know how, so anyone willing to team-up on this, particular if you live around Bath/Bristol, I would appreciate the contact.

NellyLock

trawling is possible, like automatically extracting information, just depends on whether you would have the permision from companies like betfair to allow this kinda information to be automatically extracted.

danmanchester

whatever happened to sticking a pin in football pools coupons?

newfoundglory

You need a script to do what you want to achieve. In my opinion, Windows simply doesn't provide the flexibility to do it on its own as an operating system. You want a Unix-based or Linux operating system, where you could either use a unix shell script or Perl script to extract the information you want, and then write it back to a file (although there are other ways too, such as with other programming lanaguages like C or Java).

Perl, most appropriately, actually stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. A csv file is just text, which is delimited in a special way so a spreadsheet can understand and open it.

You would have to learn about unix and the Perl programming lanaguge to do it this way though (Perl is not an easy lanaguage to learn, C is easier... or in fact you could even do this in Java) - or you could try finding someone with the time to write the script for you - maybe find yourself a computer scientist! Unix scripts can be automated with the cron tables for specific intervals, and i'm sure windows has something similar.

If you fancy a challenge, then you don't have to install unix or linux if you dont want to; you could grab a copy of Cygwin for Windows from cygwin.com - which emulates various linux tools and allows linux applications to be run under windows. I'm a freebsd tech head, and I really couldn't tell you the best way to do this in windows - maybe someone around here does?

NellyLock

you *may* be able to code it in vb or .net although i dont know specifics and enough of .net to say yes. im sure u must be able to after all it sounds like all that is needed is a well defined parser

rogue_element

I can have a look at this if you want at some point.
I wrote a script using sed, awk and lynx to extract 10,000 recipies in plain text format from a recipie site.

Just the problem is, if they change their site layout, your scripts will go !!!!!!-over-****

I created the free sim scripts, so it is definitely possible.

I can do BASH (linux) or possibly perl.

I dont know about a crontab for Windows XP-I guess you could run it in the system scheduler (???)

Chippy_Minton

You could do it in .Net (VB, C++ etc.) by using the axWebBrowser control (WebBrowser in VB6) to load the Betfair web pages into your app and then use the MSHTML IHTMLDocument/2/3 interface which provides access to the Document Object Model (DOM) to parse/scrape the data. This is a method I've used.

See Programming and Reusing the Browser and subsections. E.g for VB - http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/webbrowser/reference/objects/webbrowser.asp and http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/webbrowser/reference/properties/document.asp

Of course any page-scraping method will be at the mercy of changes in the Betfair web pages

Former_MSE_Abuse_Controller

Folks,

Just to reiterate that extracting this information may require the permission of those who own the sites. Just be aware of any legal implications that may arise.

Im not sure odds are classed as copyright data (after all it's just an opinion or assumption on the part of the bookmaker) but best to make sure you are covered

Grumpy_Old_Duffer

Chippy_Minton, rogue_element, newfoundglory ........ I didn't even have to duck .... your replies were so far above my head .

NellyLock

Grumpy_Old_Duffer wrote:

Chippy_Minton, rogue_element, newfoundglory ........ I didn't even have to duck .... your replies were so far above my head .

your question was can it be done - there answer was yes but with some limitations mainly the way it works depends on the website remaining structurally the same, scripts could do the work and pull off information but the second betfair decide to change layout/structure the scripts are liable to break and no longer work!

neil