Stuff I've learned recently…

I made a couple more fixes to my box scores script to make it a bit groovier. First is a trivial one, but it’s much more in the Groovy idiom than in Java.

I replaced

def cal = Calendar.getInstance()

with

def cal = Calendar.instance

Groovy automatically uses the getter if you access a property of a class, as long as the property itself is private. Properties in Groovy are private by default, too, which is much more intuitive than Java’s “package-private” access. Of course, methods are public by default.

The other modification I made had to do with the fact that I was concerned about reading the remote XML file line by line. I thought it might be more appropriate to read the entire file into a local variable and then parse the file.

To do that, I found that the URL class had a getText() method (or, more in the Groovy spirit, a text property). That meant I could read the entire page by writing

def gamePage = new URL(url).text

Now the matching can be done all at once via

def m = gamePage =~ pattern

which results in a collection of matches. The only complication is that the pattern I’m searching for (/${day}_(\w*)mlb_(\w*)mlb_(\d) /) appears twice in each line, once as the text value of the <a> tag and once as it’s href attribute. I figured the easiest way to deal with that was to use eachWithIndex and only worry about the even-numbered matches:

def m = gamePage =~ pattern
if (m) {
    (0..<m.count).eachWithIndex { line, i ->
      if (i % 2) {
          away = m[line][1]
          home = m[line][2]
          num = m[line][3]

etc. The rest is essentially the same.

A good source for figuring out the Groovy way to do things is the PLEAC Groovy page. It rocks.