• Changing RCF's index page, please click on "Forums" to access the forums.

Coding

Do Not Sell My Personal Information
You wouldn't use MATLAB or Excel for this.

You'd want to use C#. You could also use phantomJS or any number of automation tools but I'll go over the .NET approach here.

You'll use HTMLAgilityPack from Nuget, you'll then grab the URL for the data you want, you'll then use HTMLAgilityPack (HAP) to navigate the DOM tree to extract the data you want.

From there you'll validate the data is in the correct format, and then you'll do whatever operations you need to perform against the data (maybe in C#, maybe not - depends on the operation and how complex it is).

At that point you'll do one of two things. You'll use NPOI or OpenXML to export your data to your Excel file, or, you'll use Microsoft.Interop.Excel to push the data through COM and into Excel itself. You can automate every function of Excel with the Microsoft.Interop library; although, I recommend against this for most tasks.

Now, if you don't know C#, or any other programming language, then you're likely better off with AutoIT.

https://www.autoitscript.com/site/



Not MATLAB, but you can do this in C# using 3 different methods.

AutoIT Scripts/Macros: This is simplest. You'd write AutoIT scripts that would take you input values (your web scrapped values), and plug them into your application. This is easy as fuck.

Old School: Direct WinAPI hooks. This would hook your applications interface and plug values directly into it either by accessing it's memory or hooking the keyboard. I wouldn't do this if I could avoid it.

Modern Way: .NET WPF UI Automation. This is the best approach for programmatic access via the .NET Framework (C#, etc), and is also well documented. There's no nasty crash-prone hooks, and it should work across frameworks and platforms on any machine running Windows XP SP3 or better. .NET Framework 4.5 needs to be installed on the machine though, AFAIK.

Unless MATLAB is somehow already in the process/workflow and I'm not understanding where, then you've no reason to introduce it as an additional complexity. Unless you're looking to replace the software you're already using for calculation; but it sounds more like you simply want to automate the tasks.
Perfect this is exactly what I needed to know. Glad I only got to page 60 in my MATLAB book before asking :p

Do you know of any good online resources or any good reference books for learning C#? Also is this a downloaded software, or is it purchased?
 
Perfect this is exactly what I needed to know. Glad I only got to page 60 in my MATLAB book before asking :p

Do you know of any good online resources or any good reference books for learning C#? Also is this a downloaded software, or is it purchased?

Learning C# from the ground up, to do what you're trying to do, might be a bit much. Do you have any background in programming?

I'd recommend following the AutoIT link in my previous post as scripting AutoIT is much simpler.

However, if you'd prefer a more integrated solution, you'll want to create a C# application with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and .NET 4.5 as the target platform. You'll use UI Automation and you can find source examples on codeplex.com and stackoverflow.com.
 
So, I'm thinking of getting into languages and have yet to decide between Python and Java. I'd love to be able to code games as a career but that probably won't happen. I read on era edit that Python is easier to learn than Java, so I might go with Python.

What are the career options if I learn and become versatile with Python? App development? I'm pretty naive about this stuff too.

I feel like I was dropped in the middle of the sea with nothing but a laptop haha. I don't know which language to pick, what to learn, what career options there may be 5+ years down the line etc. I'm cool with making $30,000-$40,000 a year as a programmer if that was possible. I don't even really know what programmers do. I mean I get it, they program, but what does that mean exactly? They write code which is interpreted by the computer to display as something on the screen right?

Any tips/advice appreciated!
 
I decided to learn Python on code academy.com

code academy = cool
 
Figured I'd bump this thread even if most of the posters aren't active anymore.

Is it possible to use a language like Python to pull a daily balance from a site into a spreadsheet to track and graph the daily changes?

Is it possible to pull information for fantasy football purposes, for example, creating a spreadsheet that would track Top 10 performances by players at WR, QB, etc for the 2021 season? All time? And could I do the same thing score wise for the life of the leage such as:

TeamScoreSeasonWeek
Team 1323201911
Team 6319.7520176
Team Z31720183
 
Figured I'd bump this thread even if most of the posters aren't active anymore.

Is it possible to use a language like Python to pull a daily balance from a site into a spreadsheet to track and graph the daily changes?

Is it possible to pull information for fantasy football purposes, for example, creating a spreadsheet that would track Top 10 performances by players at WR, QB, etc for the 2021 season? All time? And could I do the same thing score wise for the life of the leage such as:

TeamScoreSeasonWeek
Team 1323201911
Team 6319.7520176
Team Z31720183
Yes it is possible. You would scrape the html to grab the data and then write it to a csv. I've personally never really used python, but it's more than capable of what you want to do. I have an app in Java that does something similar for fantasy football.
 
Yes it is possible. You would scrape the html to grab the data and then write it to a csv. I've personally never really used python, but it's more than capable of what you want to do. I have an app in Java that does something similar for fantasy football.

only thing is to be aware the HTML can change if they update the site, which could break scraping the data.

Also, depending on the site, you might have to start a session where you log in to get to the data you want.
 
only thing is to be aware the HTML can change if they update the site, which could break scraping the data.
Yeah this happened to me with FootballReference. They added an extra column to the default stats query and it threw off all of the data I was scraping. Of course I could have coded it better to protect against this, but I wrote it while I was a Junior in college and barely had taken any CS classes lol.
 

Rubber Rim Job Podcast Video

Episode 3-13: "Backup Bash Brothers"

Rubber Rim Job Podcast Spotify

Episode 3:11: "Clipping Bucks."
Top