Programming help

[tjr5259]

I have some programming questions so if someone is knowledgable and would like to help me out pm me.
Thanks.

[RS]

You should ask your questions here first and those who can help could either respond here or send a PM (if it's sensitive information). If your questions has sensitive information, then try asking your question in a vague state without giving out that sensitive information.

What are you having trouble with?

[tjr5259]

Okay here it goes. I started to look into sports betting about a month ago and have a pretty in depth excel sheet with stats for each game every day. I have been able to find lines that don't reflect what my data shows just looking at stats and I have been very successful for the past month with both nba and nhl. The problem is transferring the stats from websites to excel for each game every day is getting to be really time consuming so I want to write a program that can do that for me. I took a couple of programming classes in college but don't have that much knowledge. I have a friend with a computer science degree that could help me write the program if I told him specifically what to do but he is not interested in gambling so getting him to do the whole thing for me would be impossible. I guess I am just looking for ideas or tips on how I could go about doing this. I'm not sure how to get stats from a website and utilize that on a program or if that is even possible. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry this is not a blackjack question but I appreciate everyone's knowledge here and really didn't know who else to ask. Thanks.

[Bodarc]

Would you mind giving the url of one website from which you want to download info?

[tjr5259]

www.covers.com

[Norm]

Web-stripping is possible, but a royal pain. First, you need to read the site. This depends on the language used. For example, in VB6, you would use an INet ActiveX object and code something like:

    Inet2.URL = "http://xxxxxxxxx"
    Inet2.Protocol = icHTTP

    Private Sub Inet2_StateChanged(ByVal State As Integer)
       If State = 12 ThenDoXXX
    End Sub

    Public Sub DoXXX()
      Dim vtData$
      NBuff = ""
      vtData = Inet2.GetChunk(1024, icString)
      Do While LenB(vtData) > 0
        NBuff = NBuff & vtData
        vtData = Inet2.GetChunk(1024, icString)
      Loop
    End Sub

Then, you would have to parse the result in NBuff.
Then, you would need to get it into Excel. You can create a CSV file and invoke Excel. That’s the easy way. But, if you want to feed it into a current Excel spreadsheet, that is quite difficult and depends on the version of Excel that you have as they keep changing the damn method. Here’s a simple example from CVData of copying some data to Excel using the Excel 14.0 object model:

    If Not linkactive Then
        Set xxxapp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
        Set xxxobjex = CreateObject("Excel.sheet")
        xxxobjex.Application.Visible = True
        linkactive = True
        DoEvents
    Else
        If nam.namsimtable <> OldSimtable Then
            xxxobjex.ActiveSheet.Cells.ClearContents
            xxxobjex.ActiveSheet.Cells.ClearFormats
            OldSimtable = nam.namsimtable
        End If
    End If
    DoEvents
        With frmsimout.G1
            .Row = 0
            .Col = 0
            .RowSel = .Rows - 1
            .ColSel = .Cols - 1
            Clipboard.Clear
            Clipboard.SetText .Clip
        End With
    With xxxobjex.ActiveSheet
    .Paste Destination:=.Range(.Cells(1, 1), .Cells(frmsimout.G1.Rows, frmsimout.G1.Cols))
    End With
    If err <> 0 Then
        Set xxxapp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
        Set xxxobjex = CreateObject("Excel.sheet")
        xxxobjex.Application.Visible = True
        DoEvents
    With xxxobjex.ActiveSheet
    .Paste Destination:=.Range(.Cells(1, 1), .Cells(frmsimout.G1.Rows, frmsimout.G1.Cols))
    End With
        On Error GoTo 0
    End If

[tjr5259]

Ah thanks a lot.