Okay, here’s my experience with trying to get live cricket scores using TCL.
So, I’m a big cricket fan, right? And sometimes, I’m stuck at my computer and can’t watch the match live on TV. I wanted a quick way to get the scores without having to constantly refresh a website. I figured, “Hey, I know a little bit of scripting, maybe I can whip something up.” I decided to give TCL a shot, because I’ve dabbled with it before and found to be handy.
I remember that TCL is good for string manipulation.
My First Attempt (and Fail)
I started out all gung-ho, thinking I could just grab the entire webpage and somehow magically extract the score. Boy, was I wrong.
My very first try I use the http package geturl directly.
I quickly realized that web pages are messy, it has tons of HTML tags, JavaScript, and all sorts of stuff I didn’t need. Trying to find the score in that mess was like looking for a needle in a haystack… a very, very large haystack.
Getting a Little Smarter
After banging my head against the wall for a while, I decided to take a step back. I thought, “Okay, there’s gotta be a better way.” I started to think of how I could narrow down the search. Find a more specific portion in html content to find score information.
I tried to extract and print the selected contents, and got nothing what I want.
Giving Up (For Now)
I spent a good few hours on this, and honestly, I didn’t get very far. It was a lot harder than I expected. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, maybe with some more advanced TCL libraries or some clever regular expressions, but I just didn’t have the skills or the time to figure it out.
Eventually, I just gave up and went back to refreshing the website. It wasn’t as elegant as I’d hoped, but it got the job done.
Lessons Learned
- Web scraping is tricky: It’s not as simple as just grabbing the HTML and finding what you want.
- Websites are complex: There’s a lot of hidden stuff going on that can make it hard to find the specific information you’re looking for.
- I need to learn more: I definitely need to brush up on my TCL skills, especially when it comes to regular expressions and maybe some web scraping libraries.
So, that’s my story. It wasn’t a success, but it was a learning experience. Maybe someday I’ll revisit this and finally conquer the cricket score challenge. But for now, I’m sticking to the old-fashioned way.
