Overview -------- This tool can: - screenscrape the commodities trading screen - produce the results as a tab separated values file - upload the results to PCTB To run it, change to this directory, type `make', and then: ./ypp-commodities --tsv >commods.tsv While it is capturing the screenshots, do not move the mouse or use the keyboard. Keyboard focus must stay in the YPP client window. You will probably need to turn off `Use antialiased font' in the YPP client. This is in the Ye panel, Options, tab `General'. Command-line options -------------------- Setting the operation mode: --find-window-only Just check that we can find the YPP client window. --screenshot-only Page through and take screenshots, do not OCR --analyse-only | --same Process previously taken screenshots --everything (default) Take screenshots and process them Options to vary the processing: --single-page One screenful, no paging - results will be incomplete --quiet Suppress progress messages --screenshot-file F Store or read screenshots in F rather than #pages#.pnm --window-id ID Specified X window is the YPP client - do not search --edit-charset Enable character set editing. See README.dictionary. --find-island Find and print the ocean and island. Suppresses OCR and output unless used with result processing option. --test-servers Set default servers to be the test servers, not the real live ones (doesn't affect explicit settings). Controlling what happens to the results - only one at a time: --upload (default) Upload to the PCTB server --tsv Print data as clean tab-separated-values file --raw-tsv Dump the raw (not deduped, unsorted) OCR'd data --best-prices Print best buy and sell price for each commodity --arbitrage Print arbitrage opportunities Privacy options, which control conversations with the dictionary server: --dict-local-only * Do not talk to the server even to fetch new dictionary. --dict-read-only * Only fetch new dictionary, do not submit new entries. --dict-anon Don't quote pirate name if submitting entries. --dict-submit Submit entries quoting my pirate name. (default) Please do not use options marked * with --upload. See README.privacy. Options to override which servers we talk to: --pctb-server HOST|URL Talk to the PCTB server at HOST or URL. --dict-submit-url URL Submit dictionary entries with HTTP POST under URL. --dict-update-from SRC Fetch updated master dictionary with rsync from SRC. Or set the environment variables YPPSC_PCTB{_PCTB, _DICT_UPDATE, _DICT_SUBMIT} Files we use and update ----------------------- The program reads and writes the following files: * #pages#.pnm Contains one or more images (as raw ppms, end-to-end) which are the screenshots taken in the last run. This is (over)written whenever we take screenshots from the YPP client. You can reprocess an existing set of screenshots with the --same (aka --analyse-only) option; in that case we just read the screenshots file. You can specify a different file with --screenshot-file. If you want to display the contents of this file, `display' can do it. Don't try `display vid:#pages#.pnm' as this will consume truly stupendous quantities of RAM - it wedged my laptop. * #master-newcommods#.txt #local-newcommods#.txt Dictionary of newly introduced commodities. When a new commodity appears in Puzzle Pirates, the PCTB server operators need to add it to their database for us to be able to upload data about it. It can sometimes take a few days to do this. In the meantime, it is possible to upload partial data - data just omitting that commodity. This is controlled by these files: they list commodities which should be automatically ignored if the PCTB server doesn't know about them. The master file is downloaded and updated automatically from my server. You may create the local file yourself. The format is simple: one commodity per line. Unrecognised commodities can also be due to OCR failure so double-check what you're doing before overriding the uploader by telling it to ignore an unrecognised commodity. * #master-char*#.txt #local-char*#.txt #master-pixmap#.txt #local-pixmap#.txt Character set and image dictionaries. For the semantics of the char* files README.charset. There is not currently any accurate documentation of this dictionary format. #master-*#.txt contain the centrally defined and approved data. They are downloaded automatically from the SC PCTB server and updated each run. You can safely delete this file, if everything is online, if you want to fetch a fresh copy. #local-*#.txt are a local copy of your submissions, so that they will be used by your client pending approval by me. You can delete this file if you think you may have made a mistake. See README.privacy for details of the communications with the SC server about the contents of these dictionaries. * #commodmap#.tsv Map from commodity names to the numbers required by the PCTB server. This is fetched and updated automatically as necessary. It can safely be deleted as it will then be refetched. * #upload-1#.html #upload-2#.html We screenscrape the pages from the PCTB upload server. The actual HTML returned from the upload server is left in these dropping files for debugging etc. * .new When any of these tools overwrite one of the persistent dictionary files, they temporarily write to .new. These files are all in the current working directory. There is not yet any feature to have them be somewhere else. The helper programs dictionary-manager commod-results-processor must (currently) also be in the current directory. Future versions may have more helpers and more data files. Installation requirements ------------------------- This program has quite a few dependencies: Package (Debian etch) - For building, C compiler and build environment build-essential - pnm library, including dev files for building libnetpbm10-dev - pnm command line utilities for image manipulation netpbm - X11 libraries, including dev files for building libx11-dev - XTEST library, including dev files for building libxtst-dev - Perl-compatible regexp library, including dev files libpcre3-dev - Tk interpreter /usr/bin/wish tk8.4 - Perl module XML::Parser libxml-parser-perl - Perl module JSON::Parser libjson-perl - XTEST extension in the X server (part of X package) - Perl interpreter and basic modules perl (usu.installed) On other Linux distros the packages may have different names, but these should be roughly right for Debian and its derivatives. Reporting problems ------------------ If you need to report a bug, for example an inability to recognise, please be sure to remember the exact error message and circumstances. Also, for recognition problems there will probably be a very useful screenshot file called `#pages#.pnm'. This is likely to be very large so don't just email it to me, but if you can put it up on a webpage for me to download that will help. At least keep a copy of it. If the problem is a failure to cope with some particular YPP client display and is reproducible, try running: ./ypp-commodities --raw-tsv --single-page If this reproduces the problem, please email me the screenshot file #pages#.pnm, which will consist only of the single screen, plus the error messasge. I'll then be able to understand what's wrong, hopefully. Privacy ------- The main purpose of this program is to connect to the PCTB server and upload data. It will do that if you run it with --upload. This program will also, by default, talk to the dictionary server I have set up: to download updated image dictionaries, and to upload new dictionary entries which you create with the PCTB client dictionary GUI. This feature is mentioned in and controllable in the GUI itself, so it won't happen without you knowing about it. The uploads will by default mention your ocean and pirate name; if you don't want that, pass the --dict-anon option, or untick the box in the GUI. See README.privacy for full details. - Ian Jackson ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk Aristarchus on the Midnight ocean