More obscure projects: Magicripper
OK kids, I’m pushing out more personal projects. (There’s lots more to come… don’t worry, none of them are particularly useful. ;-)
Today’s treat is Magicripper, a tool to extract Magic card data from Gatherer. There’s a catch, of course… it used to work with the original version of Gatherer, but since they’ve upgraded the site, it no longer does. I am making it available anyway for two reasons:
1. The tarball includes pre-generated XML files with card data, which may be useful to someone.
2. Looking around on github, I noticed that I am not the only one interested in stuff like this (CCGs etc), so maybe enough people will pester me to update the code so it works with the new site as well. (Passive-aggressive motivation technique ;-)
There was a program called Spellweaver as well, that lets you search the data, much like Magi-Nation Search. (Well, sort of… Magic has a lot more cards than MND, and is much more complex. Wizards likes to come up with new features that break existing assumptions. (Hybrid mana, anyone?)) … Since the new version of Gatherer is much better than the old one, Spellweaver has probably become obsolete.
Sebastian Rittau said,
June 18, 2009 @ 12:36 pm
You surely aren’t the only one that’s interested in CCG. I had my own card-extracting Python tools for the old Gatherer. But by now I just use the card lists provided by the fantastic Yawgatog at http://www.yawgatog.com/
Chris MacLeod said,
June 18, 2009 @ 6:51 pm
Neat! I have written Magic stuff too, although I scraped card info and images off magiccards.info instead. The source code is over at http://bitbucket.org/kiv/magic-db/
and the app itself is running on App Engine at
http://magic-db.appspot.com/
It’s pretty rough around the edges, but me and a few friends have been using it for months. Feel free to check it out if you’re interested.
Hans Nowak said,
June 18, 2009 @ 9:59 pm
Cool! I like the Ajaxy stuff, like the card name completion, and how the card appears when you hover over a card name in the forum. ^_^