Lottery Results Scraper

22:01.30 - Wednesday 20th July 2005   (Link to This Entry)

I was mooching around with little to do this afternoon when I got to thinking about the scraper I was going to write for the Lottery site I ran all those years ago. The basic idea was to download the results page from the official Lottery website and extract the results from there.

I actually sat down and wrote it, and it wasn't that difficult. I wouldn't want to trust it to get everything right all the time (especially if they change the format of the pages) but it would make a find and dandy backup system, that's for sure. Put in enough error-checking and it could probably - probably - be left to it's own devices, updating a website for me.

I think I'll set it up check every night and email me the data it has extracted - that way I can check that it is actually pulling the correct data out of the page and so on.