LHpi

LHpi is LordHelmchen's price import library and sitescripts for Magic Album.

LHpi is a collection of lua scripts to be used by Magic Album, but is not part of Magic Album and thus updated and supported seperately.

Discuss, ask for help and leave feedback at the corresponding Forum Thread.

Contents 1 Sitescripts 1.1 magicuniverse.de 1.2 mtgmintcard.com 1.3 magic.tcgplayer.com PriceGuide 1.4 trader-online.de 2 The LHpi Library 3 Installation and usage 4 Development 4.1 sitescriptTemplate 4.2 dummyMA.lua 4.3 Planned features 4.4 Possible features 4.5 Problems 4.6 version history 4.6.1 pre-2.0 4.6.2 LHpi lib 4.6.3 magicuniverseDE 4.6.4 mtgmintcard 4.6.5 tcgplayerPriceGuide 4.6.6 trader-onlineDE 4.6.7 sitescriptTemplate 4.6.8 dummyMA 5 License 6 Other scripts

Sitescripts

The sitescripts are the actual price import scripts, written in lua. They use the Magic Album Lua API and the LHpi library to query and parse a website and import the price information into Magic Album. Most of the program logic is contained in the library, so the sitescript needs to hold only site-specific information and a few functions that are not easily generalizable.

In theory, you should not be dependent on a new version once a new set is available: just add new entries to site.sets table in the sitescript. Being easy to update yourself was one of the design goals.

Sitescripts will need to provide

• a table of supported sets with language and url infix fields
• a table of supported languages with url infix field
• a function to build urls
• a function to parse the html raw data into data fields via regular expressions (and the regex itself)
• optionally, they can also provide
  • functions for site specific data manipulation, in case the site has some strange formatting the library does not understand
  • a one-to-one name map for names that differ between the site and Magic Album's database
  • tables to map card names to picture versions, in case the one-to-one map and LHpi's defaults are not sufficient
  • a table with expected card count numbers for LHpi's sanity checks.

magicuniverse.de

LHpi.magicuniverseDE-v2.2.lua.zip
Sitescript version	2.2
used LHpi version	2.1
updated last on	2013-04-19
size	11.81 KiB

Magic Universe is a German site with German and English cards, priced in €.

This site started it all, since I wanted prices in local currency, and my FLG apparently uses them as price reference.

mtgmintcard.com

LHpi.mtgmintcard-v2.1.lua.zip
Sitescript version	2.1
uses LHpi version	2.1
updated last on	2013-04-10
size	7.93 KiB

Functionally the same as "MTG Mint Card.lua" by Goblin Hero and Stromglad1.

When I wanted to generalize my script for easy addaption to other sites, this provided me with a good baseline, since I could search MA for cards that my script missed but should have set. Also, the site is easy to querry and parse. They do have a currency chooser, so I started by trying to make a mtgmintcard-Euro script. I failed, but salvaged the wreck for default $ prices.

magic.tcgplayer.com PriceGuide

LHpi.tcgplayerPriceGuide-v2.1.lua.zip
Sitescript version	2.1
uses LHpi version	2.1
updated last on	2013-04-10
size	9.02 KiB

Tcgplayer Price Guide claims to accumulate prices from 75 online vendors. They are priced in $. Their tables give a high, low and average price; the sitescript contains a variable to select which one of those it should use.

As requested by Golob here. I have only adjusted the syntax of his avsets to LHpi and added the card count expectations table. Also, Promo and most special sets have not been tested yet and are commented out.
Note that cards with multiple versions are averaged in some sets and set to "variant 1"'s price in others, as the source list does not clearly identify the version. Even when it does, it is unclear if the entry without version suffix is meant to be all unspecified or version 1 only. As I wanted to keep this sitescript as basic as possible, I decided against guessing a real variant table and just added expected failcounts.

trader-online.de

LHpi.trader-onlineDE-v2.2.lua.zip
Sitescript version	2.2
uses LHpi version	2.1
updated last on	2013-04-19
size	10.4 KiB

Trader Online is a German site with German and English cards, priced in €.

I found this site while looking for Token images, found it to be parseable by sitescript, and decided to use it as a test on how well the library was adapted to support additional sites.

The LHpi Library

LHpi-v2.1.lua.zip
Library version	2.1
Tested with Ma version	1.5.2.264
updated last on	2013-04-10
size	29.34 KiB

The LHpi library is a lua script that uses the Magic Album Lua API and can be used by LHpi sitesccripts.

It is not expected to be fast, but as reliable as possible:
It first compares the user requested sets and languages with what the sitescript has available and builds a table of urls to querry, seperated by set.
Then it loops though the sets that are both available and selected:
The raw html data is fetched, parsed and entered into an intermediate table of all prices for the current edition, merging regular and foil prices to minimize calls to ma.SetPrice.
Should the same card (defined by set,card,language,(picture-)version ) be encountered again, it compares the prices. If they are equal, the new price is discarded; if they differ (Yes, magicuniverse.de's database is quirky), it uses the average price. Cards that are suffxed with a condition description are currently disregarded.
Once that cardsetTable is completed (all urls belonging to the set are parsed), it sends the prices to MA. Finally, it compares the count of set prices with the number of cards in the set (or, if given, the expectation given in the sitescript).

Logging to a seperate file is now enabbled per default (but still configurable by the variable SAVELOG in the script), since ma.PutFile(file,data,0) behaviour bug was fixed. The log is overwritten on subsequent re-runs of the script.

Installation and usage

1. Download at least one sitescript and the LHpi libray version the sitescript uses.
2. Unzip into the "Prices" subdirectory of your Magic Album installation.
3. (optional) If you want to use the SAVEHTML feature, you need to create an empty subdirectory, named like the sitescript without version suffix (for example "Prices\LHpi.magicuniverseDE").
4. (re)start Magic Album and use the sitescript (not the library) from Magic Album's Price Manager dialog.

If something does not happen as expected

• make sure the script is saved utf-8 encoded. It's customary for lua scripts to be saved ANSI encoded, but as MA expects utf input, this is what I considered the most wysiwyg approach to set cards with special characters in their names.
• open the lua file in a text editor and change "VERBOSE = false" to "VERBOSE = true". This will make the script provide feedback to help track down any problems (or just to see what it was doing) and also enable additional checks. The logging will be sent to "[MA Folder]\Prices\[scriptname].log".

I'll try to answer any questions you might have. If the script misbehaves please follow the two steps above and attach a copy of the .log to your post.

Development

sitescriptTemplate

LHpi.sitescriptTemplate-v2.1.lua.zip
Sitescript version	2.1
uses LHpi version	2.1
updated last on	2013-04-10
size	127 Bytes

This is just an empty, commented template to help write new sitescripts.

dummyMA.lua

dummyMA.zip
version	0.1
updated last on	2013-04-10
size	5.28 KiB

Magic Album API dummy to test and debug LHpi within an IDE (such as eclipse) and without needing Magic Album.

Planned features

• Promo and special sets for magicuniverse (as far as possible), mtgmintcards.
• tweak log : better differentiation of log levels (normal,verbose,debug); rewrite normal-level logentries to be more pleasing to read.
  I'd love to get users' feedback on this: how silent should normal level be; what should not be logged unless in debug mode?

Possible features

• add hardcoded exchange rate for crude currency conversion between parsing and importing.
• handle conflicting prices differently. Is averaging ok, or should the script discard one (which?) of the prices and/or throw an error ?
• import prices from condition-suffixed cards instead of dropping them.
• add another sitescript (and adapt library if needed)

Problems

• can't set the sitescript's name dynammically.

--[[FIXME the dynamic approach myname does not work, ma.GetFile returns nil for its own log :(
do
	--local _s,_e,myname = string.find( ma.GetFile("Magic Album.log"), "Starting Lua script .-([^\\]+%.lua)$" )
	if myname then
		scriptname = myname
	else -- use hardcoded scriptname as fallback
		scriptname = "LHpi.magicuniverseDE-v2.0.lua" -- should always be equal to the scripts filename !
	end
end
--]]

• number of cards in set must be hardcoded. An ma.GetCardsInSet( setid,langid,regular|tokens ) would help, but the numbers are easy to hardcode anyways.
• can't use mtgmintcard to get € prices. see [1] for details.

version history

I decided to start all versions at 2.0, since it's the continuation of magicuniverseDEv1.6.lua, but with enough changes to warrant the next major version number. Do not expect revision numbers to stay synched. The sitescripts will know which library version they need and attempt to load the right one or exit gracefully.

pre-2.0

1.2 (Downloaded 22 times)

first public release

1.3 (Downloaded 20 times)

started externalizing site-specific data to seperate .config . exeptions for some sets still remain in the code.

1.4 (Downloaded 29 times)

sanity checks should be sane again :)

config externalization progressed far enough that adding new sets should be easy

1.5 (Downloaded 5 times)

added RtR to avsets

updated expected fail and drop counts

continued config externalization and script generalization efforts

moved gpl.txt from within the zip to seperate attachment

1.6 (Downloaded 1 time)

last release under the name magicuniverseDEv1.x.lua

added Gatecrash to avsets and expectedcounts (shop does not yet provide foil)

renamed .config to .lconf to ease syntax highlighting

got rid of utf-8 BOM

changed some comments to luadoc-like

LHpi lib

2.0

completely refactored, I'll call the externalization complete:

config became sitescript, old script (and work-in-progress mtgmintcardEURO script) became the library.

improved language handling

slightly improved conflict handling: same price is merged, different price is averaged.

2.1

added number of cards per set

if no expectation is defined in sitescript, expect all cards and 0 tokens to be set successfully

minor fix to debug loging

moved handling of undefined sitescript fields to LHpi.DoImport

adapted to new sitescripts and confirmed that nothing broke in the old ones

DOING format logging more readable

reorganized LHpi.sets cardcount and variants

for kicks and giggles, have SAVETABLE generate a csv usable by woogerboys importprices :-)

magicuniverseDE

2.0

initial release

2.1

updated for MA v1.5.2.264

use LHpi-v2.1

let LHpi lib set savepath

2.2

German Nemesis added

mtgmintcard

2.0

initial release

2.1

updated for MA v1.5.2.264

use LHpi-v2.1

let LHpi lib set savepath

tcgplayerPriceGuide

2.0

initial release

just adapted Golob's avsets to LHpi syntax and tested basic functionality

2.1

updated for MA v1.5.2.264

use LHpi-v2.1

let LHpi lib set savepath

tested all core and expansions up to gatecrash, also 3 portal sets and both "Un-sets"

added namereplace table and expected card counts

commented out remaining untested sets

trader-onlineDE

2.0

unreleased

2.1

updated for MA v1.5.2.264

rewrote BuildURL and ParseHTMLData, as site was changed in the meantime.

2.2

German Nemesis added

sitescriptTemplate

2.0

initial release as part of LHpi-v2.0.zip

2.1

use LHpi-v2.1

let LHpi lib set savepath

moved to seperate file instead of including it in LHpi lib zip

dummyMA

0

initial release as part of LHpi-v2.0.zip

0.1

moved to seperate file instead of including it in LHpi lib zip

License

The LHpi library and all sitescripts are released as open source under the [General Public License].

Other scripts

Just for reference: These unrelated pricing scripts exist

• "MTG Mint Card.lua" by Goblin Hero and Stromglad1 is included with Magic Album as a working script example.
• "Import Prices" by woogerboy21.