rpscrape

Horse racing data has been hoarded by a few companies, enabling them to effectively extort the public for access to any worthwhile historical amount. Compared to other sports where historical data is easily and freely available to use and query as you please, racing data in most countries is far harder to come by and is often only available with subscriptions to expensive software.

The aim of this tool is to provide a way of gathering large amounts of historical results data at no cost.

Example data from Ascot 2018

Install

~$ git clone https://github.com/4A47/rpscrape.git

If you don't have git installed you can download the folder here.

Usage

You must have Python 3.6 or greater installed. You can download the latest Python release here.

Run the program from the scripts folder:

~$ cd rpscrape/scripts
~$ ./rpscrape.py

Make scrape requests as shown below:

[rpscrape]> [region|course] [year|range] [flat|jumps]

Options

regions              List all available region codes
regions [search]     Search for specific country code

courses              List all courses
courses [search]     Search for specific course
courses [region]     List courses in region - e.g courses ire

Tab complete is available on Linux.

The first option is that of a region or a course

Each region has a 2 or 3 letter code like ire for Ireland or gb for Great Britain. You can show the list of region codes with the following command:

[rpscrape]> regions
     CODE: mal | Malaysia
     CODE: mac | Macau
     CODE: gue | Guernsey
     CODE: ity | Italy
     CODE: swi | Switzerland
     CODE: tur | Turkey
     CODE: hk  | Hong Kong
     CODE: chi | Chile
     CODE: uae | United Arab Emirates

The other possibility for the first option is that of a specific course. To view the course codes, use the courses option as shown in the following example.

[rpscrape]> courses
     CODE: 32   | Aintree
     CODE: 2    | Ascot
     CODE: 3    | Ayr
     CODE: 4    | Bangor
     CODE: 5    | Bath
     CODE: 6    | Beverley
     CODE: 7    | Brighton
     CODE: 8    | Carlisle

If you want to search for a specific region or course, add a search term as shown below.

[rpscrape]> regions france
    CODE: fr  | France

[rpscrape]> courses york
    CODE: 107  | York
    CODE: 1347 | York Aus

To list the courses from a specific region, add the region code like so:

[rpscrape]> courses ire
    CODE: 175  | Ballinrobe
    CODE: 176  | Bellewstown
    CODE: 177  | Clonmel
    CODE: 596  | Cork
    CODE: 178  | Curragh
    CODE: 180  | Down Royal
    CODE: 179  | Downpatrick
    CODE: 181  | Dundalk

Examples

The following example shows a request for flat races from Ireland in 2017.

[rpscrape]> ire 2017 flat

The next example shows a request for the last 2 years flat form in Great Britain.

[rpscrape]> gb 2017-2018 flat

The next example shows a request for the last 20 years jump form at Ascot(code: 2).

[rpscrape]> 2 1999-2018 jumps