screen scraper programs

[Posts: 7Joined: 17 May 2012, 17:13]

Does any body on the forum use web screen scraper programs to aid fast collection of data to form personnel speed figures? I was hoping for a recommendation of a program that works well for this task and hopfully not so expensive.thanks to anybody that can help.

[Posts: 491Joined: 26 May 2009, 19:28Location: Swindon]

Installed on my system I have Web Scraper Plus+ $749 and Screen-Scraper Enterprise Edition $2799.

I played about with Web Scraper Plus+ for a while and scraped a 150,000 race database from the Sporting Life website, there is a post on this forum somewhere, which was fairly easy but I found that trying to scrape anything off of The Racing Post website impossible due to the layout and set-up.

I found that Raceform Interactive helps me with most of my needs these days

[Posts: 119Joined: 25 Feb 2008, 23:24]

Copying data from the Post site is easy enough, provided one uses Firefox or Chrome - the difficulty is creating the application in which to paste it to extract the data one wants, put it in the right format and pop it into one's database.

My vba skill level is modest, so I had to commission an Excel expert to create the applications I use: one to download data from the Post's cards, the other results, both into an Excel book which serves as my database and the medium through which I analyse races.

It takes me about a minute to copy either a card or a results page and paste it into my Excel book. I rarely analyse more than a handful of races a day, so the time taken to copy the card data is trivial. But with so much Flat racing at the moment it sometimes takes half an hour to get the day's handicap results into my base. I don't know how much faster one of the marketed scrapers such as those mentioned by The Blues Brother would do the job, but it would need to be a great deal faster to justify the costs as quoted. My applications cost me 60 US dollars each.

[Posts: 7Joined: 17 May 2012, 17:13]

thanks for the great info, gosh im out of my depth here think I need a p.c course