New here :s

[Equliser]

Hey guys!
I am working on a school project where we have to capture a lot of info of a page and do any sort of analysis on it. Now being a EVE player and fan of economy i went for market analysis. However i have a minor problem. I never worked with API in my life. The general idea at first was just to download the page and then extract data off it in sense of regex out of HTML to make a big array and then work on it. I have noticed API support so i was wondering if i should go for that instead?
I have tried out the example for python and looked into how the data is sent but sadly i don't see how i could use that in my project. The goal of the project is to take a specific item and then try finding out where to buy and sell most optimally. Since you are a more experienced bunch i hope you can tell me if API can be used for that or not?
Else I'll simply download HTML and extract from that. Any help is greatly appreciated. 

[James Muscat]

Hi Equliser,

Firstly, I'm not sure if this is the most appropriate group for your question - you refer to "HTML" but EMDR doesn't have a website exposing data, it is just a data API. It provides a constant stream of new market orders as people upload them. It sounds more like what you need is a site like EVE-Central [0] or EVE-MarketData [1] that provide access to all market orders that have been uploaded.

Assuming that you were referring to one of those sites in your original message, then I would strongly recommend looking into the API that each offers. Aside from the nature of trying to parse HTML with a regex [2], it essentially bypasses that step for you: rather than you having to pull the data out of the HTML and into some data structure in your programming language, the APIs will let you get that data as a data structure in the first place.

For example, to find all market orders for Tritanium, you can take the data returned from the EVE-Central API at http://api.eve-central.com/api/quicklook?typeid=34, parse it with your programming language's favourite XML parser, and then access all the data with your code.

A couple of notes: a lot of the data fields will refer to things like stationID=60003760 or typeID=34. To convert these to their human-readable representation ("Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant" and "Tritanium" in these examples) you'll need to refer to either the EVE static data dump or the CREST API [3]. However, you don't have to do that to achieve the main point of what you want to do - that's just for presentation.

Hope some of that is useful!

James

[0] www.eve-central.com

[1] www.eve-marketdata.com

[2] A humorous response to which can be found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

[3] https://developers.eveonline.com/ as a starting point

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