Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet Scraper

With my fantasy football draft coming up, I thought I would create a quick Groovy script to scrape a couple Fantasy Football cheat sheets. If you don't know, a cheat sheet has a ranking of players that you can use to make your draft picks. There are a bunch available online, and they are updated frequently (like now that Brett Favre is back with the Vikings I assume he will move up and Tarvaris Jackson will move down in rank).

Since I wanted the most up-to-date ones on the day of my draft, I wrote a couple classes in Groovy to read the webpages and print out the results in a common format. This turned out the be pretty easy to do.

For example, here is one from http://www.fftoolbox.com:

import org.cyberneko.html.parsers.SAXParser;

class FFToolbox {
    public List getPlayerList(){
        def playerList = []
        
        //read the XML
        ['http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/2010/overall.cfm?page=1',
                'http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/2010/overall.cfm?page=2',
                'http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/2010/overall.cfm?page=3',
                'http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/2010/overall.cfm?page=4'].each{url ->
                    def html = new XmlSlurper(new SAXParser()).parse(url)
                    def table = html.BODY.'**'.findAll{ it.name() == 'TABLE'}[0]
                    def rows = table.TBODY.children()[1..-2]
                    
                    //convert to my BO
                    rows.each{ nextRow ->
                        def columns = nextRow.children()
                        playerList.add(new CheatSheetEntry(
                                rank: columns[0],
                                name: columns[1],
                                position: columns[2],
                                team: columns[3],
                                byeWeek: columns[4])
                                )
                    }
                }
        return playerList
    }
}

Note that the import is from here and provides an HTML parser

Here is another example from ESPN.com:

class ESPN {
    public List getPlayerList(){
        def playerList = []
        
        def url = 'http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/football/ffl/story?page=NFLDK2K10rankstop200'
        def html = new XmlSlurper(new SAXParser()).parse(url)
        
        def table = html.BODY.'**'.findAll{ it.name() == 'TABLE'}[0]
        def rows = table.TBODY.children()
        
        rows.each{nextRow ->
            def columns = nextRow.children()
            def positionMatcher = columns[3].text() =~ /\D+/
            playerList.add(new CheatSheetEntry(
                    rank: columns[0],
                    name: columns[1].text().substring(0, columns[1].text().indexOf(",")),
                    position: positionMatcher[0],
                    team: columns[1].text().substring(columns[1].text().indexOf(",") + 2),
                    byeWeek: columns[2])
                    )
        }
        
        return playerList
    }
}

Basically they do the same things: Connect to and parse the url(s), find the table with the cheat sheet, and then go through the rows and columns assigning the correct values to a GroovyBean called CheatSheetEntry.

Now I just need to combine the lists somehow to get an average ranking of the players.