Original Blog Entry: History parsing script planning is making progress

hypersoniq — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:46:58 GMT

So, in Python there is a library called Requests which can get a web page. There is also a library called Beautiful Soup which can determine the structure of web page data. This is how I get around the PA website not having an actual REST api to return json formatted data.

Once the structure of the results is determined, the data of interest will be stored into a data type like a Python dictionary, sorted ascending by date, and written to a csv file.

In planning, to capture ALL of the PA games, this will require 16 csv files, as PB and MM bonus balls will be isolated. Or 18 if I decide to keep PB double draw data as well.

For the sake of accuracy, I will construct each file as a separate run of the build script.

When it comes to the update script, this will read from the current year and only append draws greater than the last date in the csv file... this will update every game, all at once.

The actual script to classify frequencies is literally the same at it's core, with different parameters for each game, so when designing the script, these will be passed as parameters, reducing the classification part to just one script. Keeping it modular!

Because of features like grid view dynamic layouts and it's ability to be ported directly to Android, I am skipping tkinter and pyQT for the gui and going directly with Kivy.

Still have to manually update and get a pick for the next P3 cycle, but a plan is in place!

Once the core functionality is in place, features like graphs will be added later. This will be a perfect sandbox to experiment with feature requests!

And that is what will be going on behind the scene while I am playing the cycles next year. Still time to have the PA lottery pay for it all...

Happy Coding!... [ More ]