Ok, after a year or so out of botting, i'm about to re-embark on automating my cash donations instead of doing them manually. 
Seeing as i'm now a big Linux fan, i've dumped VB6 and have been really enjoying Python. I've slapped together some scraping code and have a couple of "form" bots that automate some form studying techniques via the sporting life website. So far, one is showing a 7% ROI at official SP and considerably more at BSP, however it's early days and it's only picked 37 winners from 238 selections since 1st feb. The strike rate is not too impressive, although it has been picking out some nice priced winners, hence the decent ROI. I also have a couple of other ideas, so it's time for me to write myself a betfair scraping library in Python...
In the past, my VB6 bots were always dedicated to horse and greyhound racing, so in order to get a list of markets, i simply called the "Todays Card" urls from the menu. I now want to investigate other sports, so am wondering if there is a one-hit way of getting a list of ALL active markets on the exchange? I could probably call http://site.sports.betfair.com/Menu.do and then navigate from there, but it looks like it could get a bit messy, so i'm wondering if the Free API call to GetAllMarkets will return EVERY market?
I'm currently at the planning stage and everything seems very straight forward, other than obtaining a list of markets. I'm also open to other suggestions, such as recommended json parsing libraries and/or regexs, etc.
GetAllMarkets will certainly do the business, it will return all markets or a cross section of markets selected by sport type and or start time.
As market acquisition can be totally separate to betting you could easily use the API for that and stick with your scraping for betting if you wished.
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