Web Scraping
Lotto Sorcerer version 9 offers a wealth of tools to keep your lottery drawing database up-to-date. One of these tools is the powerful web scraping feature. Instead of visiting a web page and manually typing in the latest drawing results, you can use this feature (if the data is presented in a text format).
Although this procedure is presented in several steps, with practice, you will find that this procedure is quite intuitive, and can be performed quite easily and quickly, with a level of accuracy that far exceeds manually entering the data.
Step One of Five: Select the lottery you want to update
For this example, we want to update the Texas All or Nothing (Morning) lottery for March 27, 2018. So we select this lottery from the dropdown menu at the top of the Main Window, then click on "March 27, 2018" in the Calendar.
Step Two of Five: Highlight the Drawing Data that you want to Input
In this example, we go to the website where the drawing results are displayed (in this case, http://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/Games/. We highlight the drawing (by holding down the left mouse button as we drag through the numbers) as shown.
Step Three of Five: Copy the data to your System Clipboard:
Choose your web browser's menu item "Edit > Copy" to copy what you have selected (in step #2) to your System Clipboard. You can also use a standard keyboard shortcut for this, Control + C for Windows or Command + C for Mac.
Step Four of Five: Click the "Scrape" button in Lotto Sorcerer:
Switching back to Lotto Sorcerer, clicking the "Scrape" button will parse the text data in your System Clipboard into the appropriate boxes. After you click the "Scrape" button, you will see that the numbers you highlighted and copied on the webpage will be entered into the "Lottery Drawing Entry" boxes*.
*Only text data on the webpage can be utilized in this fashion. Lottery drawings that are presented as images will not work. However, you cannot always tell by looking at the webpage. For example, in the webpage we used for this tutorial, it appears that the numbers are images (white balls with orange letters), but there is text data there as well. Conversely, there are webpages that look like text data, but are actually images. The only way to know for certain is to try it. If it works (that is, if the proper numbers are brought into Lotto Sorcerer) then the webpage is acceptable; otherwise, not acceptable.
Step Five of Five: Click the "Enter" button to enter the data into Lotto Sorcerer:
Click the "Enter" button in Lotto Sorcerer to enter the data into the database...
...and the data is successfully entered:
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