Web Scraping Question

**vexel77** · 07-20-2013, 07:57 PM

Hi,

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum. I'm interested in creating a web scraping program to take information from two websites and compare this information and to send me an email if certain criteria are met. Could someone point me in the direction of any learning materials that would help me accomplish this mission?

Many thanks in advance for any help offered.

Some more detail:

I want to scrape the prices from this website www.bestfightodds.com and also the MMA prices from www.ladbrokes.com. I'd like to pull the data into two separate sheets and have excel send me an email should any large differences occur. Any help on this would be hugely appreciated. I've watched a series of videos on youtube but have kind of gotten stuck when comes to getting only the info I need out of the HTML code of the bestfightodds site.

Many many thanks for anything offered up to help me.

**Moska** · 07-21-2013, 10:05 AM

@vexel77
If you have some basic HTML knowledge you can use this http://scrape4me.com/
Let me know if you need help with it.

**vexel77** · 07-21-2013, 03:53 PM

Hi Moska,

Thank you for your reply. I've used google chrome to identify the href tag that the fighters name resides in. However thats as far as ive gotten. Any further guidance you could offer would be awesome. Not entirely sure this is the route i want to go down but the site certainly seems intriguing.

Many thanks

**Moska** · 07-21-2013, 04:12 PM

What exactly do you mean by "prices" Can you give me a specific example of some data you want to extract...There is a lot of stuff going on on these pages, Im not sure what to look for or what you want to compare...

**vexel77** · 07-21-2013, 04:38 PM

Hi Mouska,

The website displays a fighters name and then beside this his price to win the fight. IE Demetrious Johnson -470. I have used google chrome to identify the elements that correspond:

<a href="/fighters/Demetrious-Johnson-1773">Demetrious Johnson</a>
<span id="oddsID0">-470</span>

Many thanks

**Moska** · 07-21-2013, 05:05 PM

Well the whole thing is confined within a "table"
So type the URL in the input and where it says element type: table
Then go to "your code" and follow the "direct URL" You will be directed to this URL:
http://scrape4me.com/api?url=http%3A...=table&elm_nm=

But there is a lot more to it; you say you want to compare with other website and have Excel send you email, that is really the tricky part. I don't think I can help you with that, its very time consuming and I don't think I can do it anyway. But if you follow the link you will at least have a proper table with (raw) data, good luck.

**vexel77** · 07-21-2013, 05:13 PM

No worries dude, thats cool ill get to work with that link you've provided. Thank you for your help and the great information you've provided me with. Much appreciated.

**Moska** · 07-21-2013, 05:21 PM

You're welcome.

If you are having trouble coding you can always ask on stackoverflow.com. If you write a proper question usually you will get an answer within a matter of minutes.