Useful things for scouting

Competition Scouting
1

I just thought I’d share some useful tools for scouting.

I made a list of all matches this year and threw them in a tab-delimited text file for easy parsing: http://rocketscientistblog.com/innovators/FRCmatches.txt

You’d be better off saving the txt file because I can’t guarantee it will always be there.

I’ll post the script how I got it though:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::Simple;
  
$url = 'https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso?event_type=FRC&year=2012';

$content = get $url;
die "Couldn't get $url" unless defined $content;

@events = $content =~ /eid=(.+)">/g;

foreach (@events) {
	
	s/amp\;//;
	$newurl = "https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso?page=event_details&eid=" . $_;
	
	$newcontent = get $newurl;
	die "Couldn't get $newurl" unless defined $newcontent;
	
	@newmatches = $newcontent =~ /Events\/(.+)\/matchresults.html/g;
	
	foreach(@newmatches) {
		$eventurl = "http://www2.usfirst.org/2012comp/Events/" . $_ . "/matchresults.html";
		$eventcontent = get $eventurl;
		die "Couldn't get $eventurl" unless defined $eventcontent;
		$eventName = $_;
		@matchmatches = $eventcontent =~ /<TD align=center style="font-family:arial;font-weight:normal;font-size:9.0pt">([0-9]+)<\/TD>/g;
		$numMatches = @matchmatches/9;
		$lastMatch = 0;
		$type = 'q';
		for ($i = 0; $i < $numMatches; $i++) {
			$match = $matchmatches$i*9 + 0];
			$red[0] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 1];
			$red[1] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 2];
			$red[2] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 3];
			$blue[0] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 4];
			$blue[1] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 5];
			$blue[2] = $matchmatches$i*9 + 6];
			$redscore = $matchmatches$i*9 + 7];
			$bluescore = $matchmatches$i*9 + 8];
			if ($match > $lastMatch && $type eq 'q') {
				$type = 'q';
			} else {
				$type = 'e';
			}
			$lastMatch = $match;
			print "$eventName	$type$match	$red[0]	$red[1]	$red[2]	$blue[0]	$blue[1]	$blue[2]	$redscore	$bluescore
";
		}
	}
}

I also have a list of all registered teams: http://rocketscientistblog.com/innovators/FRCteams.txt

Same deal goes for the matches list. I can’t guarantee it will always be there.

Here’s the perl script though:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::Simple;

@teams = ();
$baseUrl = 'https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso?page=searchresults&omit_searchform=1&skip_teams=0&-session=myarea:C77D64051149c20F04NUXL2D2C16#FRC_teams';

$content = get $baseUrl;
die "Couldn't get $baseUrl" unless defined $content;

@numTeamArray = $content =~ /\(([0-9]+) found/;

$modulus = @numTeamArray[0] % 250;
if ($modulus == 0) {
	$numPages = int(@numTeamArray[0] / 250);
} else {
	$numPages = int(@numTeamArray[0] / 250 + 1);
}

for ($i = 0; $i < $numPages; $i++) {

	@nextPageArray = $content =~ /a href=\"(.+)\">Next/;
	$_ = $nextPageArray[0];
	s/amp\;//g;
	$nextPage = 'https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso' . $_;
	
	@matches = $content =~ /<b>([0-9]+)<\/b><\/a><\/td>/g;
	push(@teams, @matches);
	
	$content = get $nextPage;

}

foreach(@teams) {
	print "$_
";
}

Be wary of running the scripts too often, as it crawls the usfirst.org site any time you run them. So just run it once, pipe the output to a text file then use the text file. Only update if you have to. Also, if FIRST decides to change their site, the script will probably have to adapt.

Cheers!