Alright, so I've got this bit of code working. Working in the sense that it does indeed download the MOTL price list and parses it for cardnames and value. If we can resolve the issue I have, then I will fancy it up a bit, and make a menu link like the download pics.
The problem I now have is twofold -
one, the resulting pricelist is completely out of order.
second, the result of averaging the value of printings skews a few cards by a lot, and most cards by a little.
When Dennis first worked on the all-prices file, I don't know how he had taken account of the various printings, but some cheap commons may have Alpha and Beta printings worth 10-50x (or more) than their current counterparts.
I'm using a HashMap to store Cardname as the key, and the price as the value. If I read another price for a card already in the Map, I average the two prices then store the result back to the Map.
Subsequently, I iterate through the Map's entrySet and print the Cardname=Price. The resulting iteration is all over the map, not in the alphabetic order of the raw price list.
Note - I feel strongly about the value of averaging... it's not like we can specifically choose an Alpha
Giant Growth over an M10....