How to check a website once a day for winning numbers.

[_Omega_]

Hey i have a few tickets for a Christmas charity lottery were they once a day announce the winning numbers on their website. 

Its really not to hard to check once a day if i have a winning ticket, but i thought it might be a fun programming task to learn something new. 

 

I have some experience in Java and MATLAB (but both more for data processing (results of experiments/simulations)) + some knowledge in C for programming Arduinos.

 

Now to my question:

Is it a reasonable task i could handle? 

 

And if yes, can someone give me some sort of starting point or link to some tutorial? 

 

 

thanks in advance

 

 

 

[Coaxialgamer]

Neither of those languages are all that great for easily doing stuff like this. Python is probably easier to work with and the amount of third-party libraries for doing web stuff is great.

My advice would be to check if the website offers an API for you to use that would allow you to pull the information easily. Otherwise something like Selenium Webdriver or Requests are both good python libraries for navigating the web and scraping info off web pages.

[codesidian]

Definitely! One of my first big projects was creating a web scraper in Python, and it's a great project to learn more about web tech. 

There's two options usually:

- Simulate the browser

- Make the requests programmatically and parse the html. 

 

Now, i'm not too familiar on scraping tools for Java or C. There may also be caveats with the page you're trying to access - like it being JavaScript generated which you'll need to parse if you're making the requests yourself. Though as a starting point you can try firing a get request, parsing the body, and extracting the numbers. I've a had a quick look at what's available for Java since that's probably the quickest to develop this in:

 

 

Jsoup looks very promising, it seems to wrap the HTTP calls and the parsing. I'd say that's a good shout.

 

When it comes to scraping, you'll need to programmatically locate the element that has the data you're looking for. You need to find a "pattern" of where the data is that you want to extract. In HTML there's attributes like name, id, class etc. that you parse out to get the data you need. Jsoup should have plenty of documentation on how to do that. 

[Biohazard777]

2 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Neither of those languages are all that great for easily doing stuff like this. Python is probably easier to work with and the amount of third-party libraries for doing web stuff is great.

Eh?

 

29 minutes ago, _Omega_ said:

I have some experience in Java

Jsoup, here is an example:
https://www.baeldung.com/java-with-jsoup

[Coaxialgamer]

8 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

Eh?

Missed Java on my original read-through, which is a reasonable option. I don't think anyone would try to argue that C or MATLAB are all that web-focused though.

[Biohazard777]

2 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Missed Java on my original read-through, which is a reasonable option. I don't think anyone would try to argue that C or MATLAB are all that web-focused though.

Heh, I agree though if OP is very familiar with MATLAB he could theoretically use urlfilter . Which is definitely not something you and I would use heh, but hey if that is something he is comfortable with, why not  (same goes for C).

[_Omega_]

1 minute ago, Biohazard777 said:

Heh, I agree though if OP is very familiar with MATLAB he could theoretically use urlfilter . Which is definitely not something you and I would use heh, but hey if that is something he is comfortable with, why not  (same goes for C).

Im not  i can do complex math tasks and simulations in simulink for chemical engineering.  So i dont have much on an idea of web stuff, but thats more or less the reason i want to do it

 

[_Omega_]

Thank you guys for all you input, its getting a bit late for me to really get into it, but at least i know that its a reasonable task and it would even be possible in Java. But i might look into Python as well 

[Vicarian]

C# is similar to Java syntax-wise, and has a built-in class in .NET for working with Web requests without needing a third-party library (open source or otherwise).  Do check for an API on the server first so you don't have to scrape an HTTP response.  Much easier to parse a JSON object.

[Biohazard777]

1 hour ago, Vicarian said:

C# is similar to Java syntax-wise, and has a built-in class in .NET for working with Web requests without needing a third-party library (open source or otherwise). 

Java has HttpClient built in... It is just as "simple" to use as .NET WebRequest for what OP wants to do. 
By "simple", he would need to manually extract the info he is looking from a potentially lengthy String (instead of using selectors to find elements like a sane person ). Which is why I didn't recommend it in the 1st place....

I do agree about the API remark, if it is available that is the way to go.