I'd like to write a script that records the size of the close votes review queue on SO (currently ~95.5k), polling just a few times an hour, so I could plot a general trend. I know what I'm going to do regarding the parsing, i.e. given the following part of the HTTP response,
<div class="dashboard-num" title="95,508">95.5k</div>
I'd apply the regex
<div\s+class="dashboard-num"\s+title="([^"]+)
and split by \D
and implode the array to leave only numbers, or something similar. (Yes, The Pony, He Comes, but this is a quick-and-dirty job during which I don't expect Stack Overflow's HTML to change.)
I don't currently have a UNIX / Linux setup, else I'd throw something together using cron, cURL, and Perl (or sed or awk if I'm feeling brave enough). What's the easiest way to do this on Windows? Is there some utility that's built to do this? I'm willing to install Cygwin and such software if it's indeed the easiest way (say, compared to writing batch scripts), but I'm hoping for some program into which I can supply a URL and regex and be on my way.
.msi
from python.org, run, you're set. If you want extras, go to lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs. What's so hard about that?