[CivicAccess-discuss] Scraping election results..

[Russell McOrmond]

Daniel Haran wrote:
> Robin scraped some candidate data:
> http://cancan.waglo.com/dataface/
> 
> For elected candidates, I wrote
> http://rubyforge.org/projects/mp-ca-scraper/ last year, which may
> still be useful.

   I hate to admit this in public, but I've never managed to get a rails 
application running.  In my case I don't want to run a web application, 
I want to extract the data and import it into an SQL database.

   The page format for 
http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainCandidatesCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=Current&Language=E 
is similar to 
http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=Historical&Language=E 
, except for the column "Election Result" which says "Defeated" or 
"Elected".

   Not to get into any language wars/etc, but I may look into writing 
something in either PHP or Perl for those of us old folks who can't 
figure Ruby/Rails out.

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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