• Hi Guest Just in case you were not aware I wanted to highlight that you can now get a free 7 day trial of Horseracebase here.
    We have a lot of members who are existing users of Horseracebase so help is always available if needed, as well as dedicated section of the fourm here.
    Best Wishes
    AR

Scraping Sky Sports Racecards

S

samax77

Newbie
Hi,

I currently use the Sky Sports cards to get some basic race info I need, that being class of last race, form and weight. I then insert the data into basic excel to come up with an overall 'score' for each horse.

For the more knowledgeable out there it easy enough for a total novice to extract that data from multiple cards using python or would I be better off looking for a freelancer to do the work?
 
Hi S samax77 I would say that it depends on how good your programming skills are and try to do it yourself if you can or have a go at learning python.
As i see it if you got a freelancer to do it for you then you need to consider a few things, firstly is the cost, i dont know how much a freelancer would charge because it will depend on how long it takes them to do the job and if you have issues with the scraper they have done later down the line then you cannot fix it yourself and need to contact them again and pay for the updated scraper. So as i see it depending on how often sky alter their code then it could work out an expensive ongoing thing.
So if you can then learn python yourself it would be best or another alternative would be to subscribe to HRB (horse race base) and get the racecards each day yourself just download them into excel.
Here is the link Horse Racing Database Solutions
i use this site myself and is well worth the money and i believe you can get a free trial to see if it would suit your needs.

cheer SteveT
 
Hi S samax77

If you aren't particularly wedded to Sky Sports then give rpscrape a look. It is a set of python scripts to scrape racecards and results from Racing Post. It is very simple to use and supported by a small community of users, plus uses config files to allow you to determine what data is downloaded. Couldn't recommend it more highly. I've built additional python functionality on top of rpscrape to process the downloaded data, store it in a DB/CSV files, create my own variables / performance metrics & run my system etc. IMHO if you are going to learn python I'd focus my efforts on using it to build my own system, rather than replicate something already available.

Cheers, Richard
 
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