What's New On These Pages: October 2022

I have some future plans for these pages, of course!

• Sunday 16th October
  Finally fixed the page scraping of the Irish Euro Millions official site since they changed their results page design a little while back. It picks up the winning numbers, the jackpot prize pool amount, the European number of winners in each tier and also if there were any jackpot winners (doesn't parse the countries that won because that's too messy on the Irish site).

  Note that the jackpot prize pool amount will be ignored from the Irish site if it's an exact multiple of 1m (except for 17m, which is allowed because it's the fixed reset value for the draw following a jackpot win). This is because the Irish site is known to put jackpot estimates rounded to the nearest 1m on the page.

  Prior to the fix, I wasn't getting the jackpot prize pool amount properly, which stalled getting any of the info at all onto the pages. Interestingly, they have an accessible results page, but the HTML for that is ironically less "accessible" to my scraping (harder to parse than the "inaccessible" version).

  I took the old parsing code that used to scan the Irish site for jackpot-winning countries and moved it to the UK site parsing instead. It's somewhat lazy in that it assumes that there's no more than one winner from any single non-UK country (it will pick up the correct number of UK winners though), but that's so rare that I can fix that manually if it happens and probably code to cope with it in the future.

  It's Camelot's dismal failure to retain more than 180 days of Euro Millions results that's the problem. They have no examples of multiple Euro Millions jackpot winners from a single country for a draw left on their site! I do of course...

Previous month: September 2022

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