Winning Notification Software

[activemind]

Hi, I'm not to this forum and hope that you may be able to help me out. There are two parts to my questions.


1. I'm wondering whether there's any software tools out there that will allows you to check for your weekly lottery numbers and send you some kind of notification via email, pager or cell phone to notify your winners.

2. If there are no such tools, I would like to write one. Is there a way to automate the process of getting the weekly lottery results? Just to let you know where I'm getting at, I would like to automate the entire lottery checking process from downloading the lottery result (via API, FTP etc...) and checking the result against your numbers (in a database) and notify the winner as described above.

Thanks,
AM

 

[Beaker]

There are alerts for the winners but to check your tickets and notify you if you have won - no never seen that.

Good idea but the challenge will be to get the picks into a db.

Difficult to automate that.

Ideally the lotto corp should allow wireless validation.

 

[fenris]

It's not that hard to get the numbers into the database. Using your language of choice simply download the webpage that contains the winning numbers and parse the numbers. Parsing the numbers is the tricky part. It is difficult to make a generic function that can work on all pages. But if it is for your own use, then it is a good method.

I currently do this. Every time my lotto program loads up it hits the web and checks for new numbers and stores them to an xml file.

With modifications, it can easily check my tickets and email me with the results.


BTW, I use vb.net...

P.S. Beaker you are right the lottery corporations should make it easy to automate number retrieval. I would suggest an xml feed though.

 

[activemind]

Thanks guys for the respond. It's greatly appreciated. fenris, that's a great suggestion with parsing the web page. I wish there was a more generic approach like XML feed etc...

I'm surprise to see that there are so many lottery tools out there, but none for notification etc.

 

[fenris]

I just noticed this today. This site:

http://lotteries.olgc.ca/consumer_wn.jsp

Is xhtml. This means that you can download the source and you should be able to place it into an xml parser and get the nodes that you need for the numbers. I will try this tonight and see how it works.

 

[activemind]

Really? I should try that too. Let me know if you have any luck with it. Thanks.