VGChartz Playstation Trophy League

[Arcturus]

fadetoone said:

Arcturus said:

Yeah, I used to have a script that FadeToOne developed for me. It would automatically log into the PSN accounts via the playstation website, gather everyone's trophy data, and post it to an Excel file. It worked great, and saved me anywhere from 1-2 hours each week. Unfortunately, Sony has since updated their site several times and this has caused the script to no longer function.

Having a script that could mine data from PSNprofiles would be great. I've thought about taking the time to learn how to create such a script. I have some programming knowledge, and have a rough idea of how it could work, but I'm not sure what the best language & tools to use.

Yeah, that tool I made was just a web scraping script, and then Sony changed their trophy pages to some kind of javascript madness that was impossible to dig into.

Ideally, there's an API that a script could simply access, but there's little to no public knowledge about it anywhere.  Makes you wonder where all these trophy sites are getting their info.

Yeah I've often wondered how sites like PSNprofiles gathers its data, considering the number of people they track and the frequency in which they update their data.

KylieDog had an interesting though a few pages back - create a web scraping script to grab trophy data from PSNprofiles. My knowledge is limited in this field but it seems like it would be fairly easy to do:

1. Read list of users from a txt or csv file
2. Navigate to http://psnprofiles.com/
3. Scrape trophy data from page source. For example:

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each other user.
5. Output all data to csv or xls file.

I would love to attempt writing a script like this, but I don't know where to start.

Does anyone have any good resources for creating simple web scraping scripts for beginners?