Eve online killboard metagaming, with libcurl and regex

A few days ago in Eve Online, the alliance which I am a member of was declared war on (a pretty common occurence in the game). 
Taking a quick look at the killboard of this warring corp got me thinking about a project i previously added to the “program it later” pile (a pile that is growing at an alarming rate). Anyway, looking at the prevalence of eve dev killboards (open source php and mysql, I host one myself here http://owenworley.co.uk/eve/kb), my idea was to knock up a little app which grabs the killboard homepage of a specified corp, grabs all killmail links, grabs these pages and parses the name, corp, (alliance), location and ship of everyone involved in the kill.

The net result: a full list of members, what ships they like to fly, and where… very useful.

The technical side, if anyone is interested, would be using libcurl to pull the main page, and regular expressions (i am using boost::regex) ti detect appropriate names and links.

Work is progressing at speed, with the basic functionality implemented,all that is left now is to pretty print the results.

Also, as libcurl and regex are both available in php, an interesting side project would be to port it over, allowing it to be used from a website (as opposed to .exe download). php would also allow for easier formatting of the output data (portraits of characters and ships).

Stay tuned for the full app, which will be posted when it is complete :-).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>