What's New On These Pages: June 2026

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

• Monday 22nd June
  Managed to change the main Lotto (and Hotpicks) results grabbing from the official site to get two rounds of draw info and add it as two new lines in my data file. Will cross-check tonight to make sure that Thunderball and Set For Life results (also handled by the same script) still work correctly.

  I will also need to look at the code I have for YouTube drawn order grabbing via subtitles to see if I can pick up both rounds of drawn order balls - which annoyingly remains the only official way to get the drawn order of the balls thanks to the official Web site dropping all such info quite a while ago.

• Sunday 21st June
  Adjusted my draw day script that I pass main (and Thunderball) drawn order balls manually to - it generates new lines in the appropriate data file, adds a newsflash and re-generates the appropriate pages. For the main Lotto, I now pass 14 ball numbers instead of 7 (one set of 7 ball numbers for each round) and it now inserts two lines of data instead of 1. Next up today is scraping the main Lotto (and matching Hotpicks) results from the official site for both draw rounds (at the moment it can only scrape round 1).

• Saturday 13th June
  Fixed a minor bug in the ALT/TITLE attribute generation for Round 2 of the main Lotto (the 6th number was from Round 1 and not Round 2 - whoops!). Thanks to "Nikolaj" for spotting that one. Next up w.r.t. code changes is results grabbing of the main Lotto Round 2 - I entered those in manually last Wednesday (I was surprised the code managed to get Round 1 OK though!).

  Managed to spend a bit of time fixing the dynamic pages (ticket checker, winning numbers, prizes/winners, sales figures), so they're looking a bit better now. It was mainly because I had a query from someone about results checking in CSV format with the new 2 rounds and luckily the change was fairly straightforward. The Ticket Checker does still need some work (parts of it still don't know about the 2 rounds and only looks at round 1).

  Fixed the grabbing of the YouTube live draw official video URL for each draw. They'd put the word "New" in the main Lotto video description, which messed up my parsing. I just removed that word from the parsing and it was all good again.

• Thursday 11th June
  Improved the individual draw's main Lotto page - there's now 6 prizes/winners tables (3 for the main Lotto and 3 for Lotto HotPicks), which I suspect is unique (the official site has 2 tables and other popular non-official sites also have 2 tables).

  There's still quite a bit of work left to do on that draw page, but I need to switch to results grabbing next because yesterday's main Lotto results were half manually entered into my data file (it only grabbed round 1 of the 2 draw rounds).

• Wednesday 10th June
  Well, the big day finally arrived when the main Lotto somewhat dubiously decided to have two separate draws that your single ticket enters into. Of course, when I organised my data files many years ago for all the ball-based games, I'd assumed that there'd be a max of one draw per day both in the data file and code.

  I didn't want put the second draw of the day into a separate data file and I also didn't want the old draw data disrupted either, so I suffixed "_2" for the second draw of the draw's number (e.g. tonight's second draw would be 3179_2) and I can use the underscore - which isn't present anywhere else in my data file - to identify it's a second draw.

  When reading in data from the file, I store the second draw data in a second set of arrays (so I can have access to the first and second draw set of data should I need both e.g. for combined info across both draws). It does mean that I'll need a bunch of extra code for draws from 3179 onwards that I'll be gradually adding. So, for example, the stats pages and pages that are dynamically generated currently are ignoring the second draw of a day until I get around to adding code to handle that.

  In case you're wondering, my £2 stake for tonight's two draws won me a prize! Predictably, it was the bleeding awful £1 prize for matching 2 numbers on one of the draws - yep, I got only half my stake back as winnings - more like "losings". It is completely ridiculous that you now can play the lottery, "win" a cash prize and actually lose money overall!

  BTW, am I the only one hugely puzzled why tonight's draw was a normal one with the lowest possible jackpot prize pool (£2m) when they're launching a complete restructure of the main Lotto game? Even more bizarrely, they had a main Lotto must be won Super Draw last Saturday that had a single £12m jackpot winner, as opposed to the dismal £1,000 top prize that was won tonight.

Previous month: May 2026

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