Writing scripts to parse Heritage completed auction results

I absolutely hate sorting through completed auctions at Heritage to try and figure out what a particular coin has been selling for (if there are recent ones).

So, I thought I'd write a program to help.

Apparently, Heritage has had things like this before. They detected something (too many keystrokes too quickly? "Use of developer or inspection tools"? Unsure.

ANYWAY... I highly doubt that they would be willing to give me permission, but...

1) IF THEY WOULD... can anyone think of a scenario that they might agree to?
I can guarantee that I'm qualified.

2) If they WOULDN'T... does anyone have a better way?

Back before I learned the tools that would accomplish this, I tried copying & pasting into Excel and running VBA macros to clean up the data. I was hoping for a better, more elegant solution.

Your help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

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I have nothing useful to offer, but a lot of web sites have issues with third parties scraping data from their sites. I use an online google spreadsheet to track my portfolio and the sites I use to pull in real time data sometimes arbitrarily change their formatting, presumably to mess with freeloaders like me scraping their data.

I spend some time to fix it and carry on.

 

What are the capabilities of the programming language you are using? Is it a full-capability language like Java or C#?

Try putting a timer in between each network command to slow it down to a human speed. If you are simulating typing into a page, you may need to put some sort of Sleep() timer between keystrokes, for example. Or, if you are packaging up all the input into a few packets, make sure to wait a bit extra after receiving a response back, just as if you were a person.

I’ve tried automating a few things over the years, but not recently. I can look around through my saved code if you want to give more detail about what you are doing.

Once you slow the interactions with the web site down to a human speed, you can wander off and have some coffee, or just let it grind away in background. It does sound like this is a time-critical function.

 

Python.

Good idea on the timing thing.

Thinking about reaching out to Heritage. If they could sell a service like this, would they? Would it benefit them or hurt them?

 

We know they make their data available to NGC and PCGS, who report auction prices in their population reports.