Python Libraries - Easy Splinterlands Card Monitoring

I don’t tend to write scripts for the sake of it; they need to accomplish something useful. As the Splinterlands Sets are going to rotate in early December, I noticed players are starting to dump their cards from the 'Dice' and 'Untamed' sets.

I have had my eye on several legendary cards from the latter set for a while now, and wanted to pick up a few 1 BCX units. I could keep checking but that's too much effort. I wanted to click a shortcut and see all my possible targets easily.

...'some of the most powerful summoners are rapidly falling in value, I want to check on these and a few more at the click of a button'...

@bozz has been asking me a few things regarding Python lately, and this is a little diversion using the Splinterlands API as opposed to the now deprecated BEEM library which he was been using.

The lack of examples is typically abysmal on the internet, but I found an old article by @ecko-fresh who appears to have vacated HIVE. His article amassed a pitiful reward of $0.00.

I dropped a comment on his post, and promised to donate a FULL comment vote if he ever comes back and sees this. I note there is a Python Community which I have now joined, hosted by @emrebeyler. I will be posting all my crap in there going forward.

My script is simple, it’s not multi-file, has no ‘dunder’ statements, or functions. I know about all these, but if you are trying to lay some basics out, then I say ditch that style for the moment.

import requests
import os

os.system('cls')

# Define BCX, Default is set to 1
BCX = 1

# Add More cards to the tuple if desired on new lines
shopping_list = (
{"Card": "Cornealus", "ID": "199", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "4"},
{"Card": "Phantom of the Abyss", "ID": "177", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "4"},
{"Card": "Sea Wreck", "ID": "558", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "8"},
{"Card": "Immolation", "ID": "559", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "8"}
)

print("--Current Lowest Prices--")
print()

for card in shopping_list:
    lowest_buy_price = float('inf')

    getstring = "https://api.splinterlands.io/market/for_sale_by_card?card_detail_id=" + card["ID"] + "&gold=" + card["Gold"] + "&edition=" + card["Edition"]
    response = requests.get(getstring)
    cards = response.json()

    for foundcard in cards:
        if foundcard["bcx"] == BCX:
            buy_price = foundcard["buy_price"]
            if buy_price < lowest_buy_price:
                lowest_buy_price = buy_price

    print("Card:", card["Card"])
    print(f'Lowest Buy Price: ${lowest_buy_price}, BCX: {BCX}, Gold Foil: {card["Gold"]}')
    print()

os.system('pause')

Thirty eight lines of code including spaces, comments and you have the desired objective. Hopefully @bozz and some others can follow this, and add more content to @emrebeyler’s community.

As usual I will go through this and try and explain how it works, with a link to my GitHub repository at the foot of the post.

import requests
import os

os.system('cls')

Import statements are adding references to other libraries. ‘requests’ is used to manipulate the JSON data from the Splinterlands API call, and ‘os’ allows us to use commands similar to those in a Windows CMD shell.

Eg.. 'cls' clears the screen, easy right?

Next we have the user defined areas of the script.

# Define BCX, Default is set to 1
BCX = 1

# Add More cards to the tuple if desired on new lines
shopping_list = (
{"Card": "Cornealus", "ID": "199", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "4"},
{"Card": "Phantom of the Abyss", "ID": "177", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "4"},
{"Card": "Sea Wreck", "ID": "558", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "8"},
{"Card": "Immolation", "ID": "559", "Gold": "false", "Edition": "8"}
)

BCX = 1 means, the script will only look for single cards, not combined.

The ‘shopping_list’ tuple contains several dictionary lists within it.

Card": "Cornealus"

The name of the card you potentially are checking on.

"ID": "199"

Each Splinterland card has a unique ID. To find the card’s ID, issue this command in a browser.

https://api.splinterlands.io/cards/get_details

What you get back is overwhelming but you can search for cards easily within the content. Look at the top left corner and you will see:

[{"id":1,"name":"Goblin Shaman"

‘Goblin Shaman’ has the prestigious title of being ID:1.

"Gold": "false"

Is the card you are searching for a Gold Foil or not? This is a Boolean value and can be toggled to ‘true’.

"Edition": "8"

Finally, the Edition is the set identifier. Alpha =1, Untamed = 4, RiftWatchers = 8. You can probably figure out the ones in between.

print("--Current Lowest Prices--")
print()

I am not going to explain what ‘print’ does, as it may blow your mind and render you a quivering, gibbering halfwit.

for card in shopping_list:
    lowest_buy_price = float('inf')

    getstring = "https://api.splinterlands.io/market/for_sale_by_card?card_detail_id=" + card["ID"] + "&gold=" + card["Gold"] + "&edition=" + card["Edition"]
    response = requests.get(getstring)
    cards = response.json()

    for foundcard in cards:
        if foundcard["bcx"] == BCX:
            buy_price = foundcard["buy_price"]
            if buy_price < lowest_buy_price:
                lowest_buy_price = buy_price

The main engine of the script is this For loop. Let's break it down some.

lowest_buy_price = float('inf')

This is an interesting placeholder, which effectively sets the value of ‘lowest_buy_price’ to positive infinity. We want to set this high value for every search.

getstring = "https://api.splinterlands.io/market/for_sale_by_card?card_detail_id=" + card["ID"] + "&gold=" + card["Gold"] + "&edition=" + card["Edition"]

The API call, returns a JSON string with ALL the parameters sent to it.

A lot of data and not so useful yet as we are only looking for one return value, the cheapest!

response = requests.get(getstring)
cards = response.json()

These lines make use of the ‘requests’ library and format the data into something a little more usable. You don't need to know the intricacies of other library functions unless you are willing to deep-dive.

for foundcard in cards:
    if foundcard["bcx"] == BCX:
        buy_price = foundcard["buy_price"]
        if buy_price < lowest_buy_price:
            lowest_buy_price = buy_price

This routine loops through all the data and adds a single float into the ‘lowest_buy_price’ variable if it's the lowest price

for foundcard in cards:
    if foundcard["bcx"] == BCX:
        buy_price = foundcard["buy_price"]

        print(buy_price)

        if buy_price < lowest_buy_price:
            lowest_buy_price = buy_price

If you want to know what all the prices are, then add a print statement such as this sandwiched in between the other code statements. This is generally how I debug my code.

. All we need to do now is present the data to the instigator of this script.

print("Card:", card["Card"])
print(f'Lowest Buy Price: ${lowest_buy_price}, BCX: {BCX}, Gold Foil: {card["Gold"]}')
print()

Using f’ strings, we can mix text with variable data for easy ingestion.

os.system('pause')

Remember what I said about the 'os' library and shell commands? As we will be running this in a shell then it needs to pause so we can read the screen.

Assign a Shortcut and add it to your other Python Launchers. Mine has the parameters of:
E:\Anaconda3\python.exe "E:\Anaconda3\Scripts\FindCheapSPLCards\FindCheapSPLCards.py

... and there you have it, info with a simple click! All of them are still too bloody expensive for me. I will bide my time and wait a little longer.

This is the script in its basic form. A lot more could done such as colour coding the output, recording the values into a file, importing the previous ones on subsequent runs, comparing the prices, separating the data into a separate file and importing it, using dunder main!