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HKer based in the UK | Android Developer | Phone Enthusiast | Photography | Warwick Comp Sci Student

  1.   Over 2000 National Rail stations. How did I put them all in an array in a couple of hours? Using this sly trick: Since all the stations are listed on the National Rail website, I did a screen scrape of the page and applied regular expressions to strip out the HTML I didn’t want. Alas, Yahoo Pipes only allows me to create a XML page, so I went a step further and wrote a simple Java program that retrieves HTML pages. Apply a few more regular expressions to strip out the XML and I get a list of 2000 stations, perfectly formatted with quotations and commas, ready to drop in to my Android app. It’s amazing what technology can do.

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    Over 2000 National Rail stations. How did I put them all in an array in a couple of hours? Using this sly trick:

    • Since all the stations are listed on the National Rail website, I did a screen scrape of the page and applied regular expressions to strip out the HTML I didn’t want.
    • Alas, Yahoo Pipes only allows me to create a XML page, so I went a step further and wrote a simple Java program that retrieves HTML pages. Apply a few more regular expressions to strip out the XML and I get a list of 2000 stations, perfectly formatted with quotations and commas, ready to drop in to my Android app.

    It’s amazing what technology can do.