Using VB.NET to screen scrape betfair

ncooper1974 · 08-13-2007, 04:23 AM

Hi

1st time poster here, so hopefully i'm in the right place. I've tried a few searches of this site to see if the info already existed but can't seem to fine what i'm looking for - hence this post. Anyways, I'm fairly new to programming although I do have some programming experience as i've used varios automated test tools (most recently WinRunner).

I'd like to write a bot to screen scrape exchange poker on betfair, and someone suggested that i use asp. As I only have XP Home (ASP only on XP PRo apparently) i've gone for ASP.NET, as cos I have some knowledge of VBScript I thought I'd use that route.
Before I actually get started, can anyone think of a reason why I shouldn't be using this? or can they recommend anything better (possibly easier to code)? It looks like the main stumbling block is that I need to scrape an applet rather than just a web page displaying html so wondering which tools I can use and how well they interface VB.NET.

Like I say, I haven't started yet, so to save me hours of going down this route to then find out its not possible, just wondering if anyone has done anything similar and can share their experience with me
Thanks
Nick

DJMaze · 08-13-2007, 05:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ncooper1974

write a bot to screen scrape exchange poker on betfair

And for what benefit?

ncooper1974 · 08-13-2007, 05:40 AM

ultimately, scrape the applet, parse the data and look at the odds.
then place a bet depending on what the odds are - dont really care what the hand shows its the decimal odds i'm interested in.

Is asp.net the way to go, or can you suggest another option?

DJMaze · 08-13-2007, 06:58 AM

I don't think you can in any language.
If the people that created the applet are smart enough, then the cards are shuffled serversided and then there's no change to cheat.

ncooper1974 · 08-13-2007, 07:14 AM

I dont want to cheat - that not my intention. and i dont care if the cards are shuffled, cut, shuffled again or whatever - all i want to do is scrape an applet. Are you telling me that is not possible in any language?

teknomage1 · 08-13-2007, 08:14 AM

computers are really good at taking font descriptions and turning them into to pictures. Unfortunately they're terrible at turning pictures into text. That's pretty much what scraping an applet would entail.

ncooper1974 · 08-13-2007, 11:56 AM

no, not quite. i'm not trying to decode a pair of aces into text.
next to each hand there will be its odds, in decimal format (i.e. 1.10, or 3.5) - thats all i'm after

teknomage1 · 08-13-2007, 12:47 PM

my point is that the text you see on the screen at that point is just pixels i.e. a picture of text. It's not like html which is marked up textual data. The applet is just a block of pixels. The fact that you as a person can see words in the patterns of those pixels doesn't help your program see them.

ncooper1974 · 08-13-2007, 01:30 PM

Oh - i see. I was beginning to think you missed my point, but its actually me who missed you point.
So you're saying, as it seems DJMaze also pointed out, that there is no way that i can scrape this 'text' if its in an applet?

Belisarius · 08-13-2007, 01:50 PM

Well, what you'd want to look into is how people beat CAPTCHA images. From there you could probably figure out how to screen-scrap an applet.

I've done a lot of work with Java, but not much at all with Applets, so I don't know if it'll work, but you might be able to decompile (there are pretty good tools to do this) and reverse engineer the applet, and hook into the network with a custom app, and get a hold of the data and do your calculations that way. You wouldn't be able to cheat, as most of the important bits would be on the server, but you should be able to get a hold of stats and number-crunch automatically.