Stuff I've learned recently…

I noticed running the Groovy code I posted the other day that I accidentally reversed home and away. It’s not critical, because I still got the URL right, but it’s better to be right.

The fix was just to switch the groups:

away = m.group(1)
home = m.group(2)

and then to update the ${away} and ${home} in the URL link for the individual games.

I’m not sure that the best way to go is to use the eachLine method on the open stream, either. It’s probably better to download the whole page and then process it. I’m not sure how eachLine is working under the hood. If it’s sending a new HTTP request per line, it’s going to be pretty slow.

I also did some very rudimentary Date processing, always an ugly and awkward thing in Java. The URL’s for each game need the day, month, and year, where the day and month have two digits and the year has four. Just to keep things simple, I did it this way:

def cal = Calendar.getInstance()
def year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR)
def m = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1  // Ugly off-by-one correction
def d = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH)
def month = (m < 10)? "0" + m : m
def day = (d < 10) ? "0" + d : d

Now I can run the script without arguments and it checks on the status of the current day’s games. I’ll update it soon so that I can enter in a date, but dates are always awkward so I’m hesitating. When I turn all this into a web app (probably using Grails), I try to insert some calendar widget with some Ajaxy goodness.