resultscraper

Introduction

Hola hackers! This is a repo for a fun and practical purpose. I believe in learning by doing stuff.

This is a programming challenge , but way more real than those found on topcoder or hackerearth. Choose your own language , it could be any server side language nodejs, perl , php , C# , ruby , python , coldfusion , hack, haskell ,groovy, C/C++ ( I know it's crazy to do it in C/C++ ! ) . I will be going with C++ ,as I want to learn C++ ( which is my primary aim for creating this challenge )

Bounty

If you are a real hacker , you do not need this point , for the fun of completing this task in least code and least time with max efficiency is enough for you. For others you will have learnt almost all of the real concepts of your language in one single fun task.

Task

This is a webscraper which fetches results and images from our college website MANIT
dolphin technologies is the service which provides the database for our results. This is the result page which we need to attack for the results
As the results are released on 31st of december and all students put load on that shitty server , it is almost impossible to see results without a script. The result page form has 2 fields one for scholar number , other for semester .

Challenges

• Fetch my result scholar-131114141 sem-5 ( .html )
• Fetch the whole class results scholars- (13111001 to 131114166) sem-5 with some scholars missing in between , you need to take care! (.html)
• Sort the results according to their GPA's and write the order into a new file ( .html )
• Download all the student's images ( .jpg)
• Arrange an individual student's data into a neat XML/JSON file/doc(.xml/.json)

Some points

• scholar number is just a number used to identify a student in the college its decomposition is as follows :-
  13- joined in 2013 + 111 ( nobody knows -_- ) + 4 ( branch code - electronics ) 141 ( roll no ) = 131114141 I am in 3rd year of a 4 year course so valid scholar numbers - 12/13/14/15 + 111 + 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 + ***

General structure of this repo will be like
repo
-language
-code
-images
-results
resultsorted.html
-xml/json
* Try to write "from scratch" solutions , use of libraries is not encouraged, as you learn lesser and the task gets simpler ! * elegant code will help future learners better, for example bit shifting hackery . * extra points - demonstrate use of efficient data structures to handle data and algorithms to manipulate it .