Malthusian Monks,

Personal project - I'm thinking about next year's football pool. It seems an obvious thing for the Perl programmer in the pool to create a script that scrapes weekly stats from the league website and puts them into a DB for compilation & comparison. No more manual stats collection.

Never done this, personally. Some reading suggests that www::mechanize would be a good module for this task.

BUT - I've noticed that on the web page I'd want to scrape, the stats columns randomly change order on subsequent views. Either the programmer was just lazy and used 

foreach $col (keys %columns) {
     print...
}

[download]
producing randomly ordered output, OR the admins are intentionally trying to frustrate scrapers.

Anyway - my questions:

Thanks.




Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

In reply to www::mechanize to scrape randomly ordered data? by punch_card_don

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