[Java]-how to read information off webpage?

Are you allowed to republish the results?

You could use something like selenium with a htmlunit driver.

There is lots of ways to parse what's on that page
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2168610/which-html-parser-is-best

One option is use a HTML parser library so you can use simple methods to get the results you need, e.g. using the jsoup parser

String html = /*You get the raw HTML from a http request*/;
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
Element lottoPlusOne = doc.select("div.LottoPlus1").first();

Using a HTML parser is a easiest way to do this as it will do most of the work for you. Sometimes though a parser might be too much for the purpose intended so you could just parse the page yourself and pull out what you need.
You can use lots of different approaches to do this, probably one of the easiest ways is to use the substring() method of the String class.

String html = /*You get the raw HTML from a http request*/;

// get starting position of interested text
int beginningOfText = html.index("<div class="latest-results LottoPlus1">");

// get ending position of interested text
int endOfText = html.index("</div>", beginningOfText);

// pull out the interested text
String lottoPlusOneHTML = html.substring(beginningOfText, endOfText);

That would give you the Raw HTML of the LottoPlus1 latest results and you could pull out the info you need from there.

I would advise the HTML parser route as doing it yourself is pointless unless it's for a college project or something as if the HTML changes slightly it may break a manual approach whereas the HTML parser would be far more robust.

Logical_Bear wrote: »

thanks all!
Seamus by feed i take it you mean an RSS?

Could be RSS, but many sites provide more modern things like SOAP services or minimal APIs.

The main benefit of them is that they won't suddenly change one day and break your application.

With so many sites offering mobile versions, you can also exploit them as they will be simpler and smaller pages.

This can be dodgy in that it violates T&Cs of sites, make sure you can't get into trouble for reusing data that does not belong to you.

Logical_Bear wrote: »

should I mail the webmaster or something?
Was just using that lotto link as an example

Yeah that might be an idea, check if there are any terms and conditions listed on the site. Generally web scraping is something that is really frowned upon.