Problem 42638. Number of active Cody players by date

Created by Matthew Eicholtz

Solve Later

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I'm looking to start a series of problems related to web scraping. In this problem, you are given a date in 'dd mmm yyyy' format and must return the total number of active Cody players as of that date. Active is defined as having a nonzero score.Examples<pre class="language-matlab">numcodyplayers('1 Jan 2000') returns 0
</pre>because Cody did not exist (at least not publicly) at that time<pre class="language-matlab">numcodyplayers('26 Jan 2012') returns 260
</pre>because in the first week of recorded activity, 260 unique players participated.Notes<ul><li>Players who were active on or prior to the input date count toward the output. For instance, if the input date is yesterday, then all activity prior to 12:00am this morning should be included.</li><li>You may find <a href = "http://blogs.mathworks.com/videos/2015/09/23/reading-web-pages-part-1-using-webread/">this recent blog post</a> helpful for getting started.</li><li>As tempting as it may be, I encourage you not to hard-code the answers. I will update the test suite if this becomes an issue.</li></ul>

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Last Solution submitted on Dec 18, 2020

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LY Cao on 29 Sep 2015

Hi Matt Eicholtz, it's a great problem. but the testsuite results look strange for me: According to this site:http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/badges/3?page=120, the last solver badge on 26 Jan 2012(for Solution 7330) is the 266th of all.Did I miss something? Thank you.

Matthew Eicholtz on 29 Sep 2015

LY Cao, hmm...that's strange. I am wondering if the Cody pages are not all up-to-date. I was using the Recent Activity pages. Let me look into it; I may just add some tolerance to the test suite results.

Matthew Eicholtz on 29 Sep 2015

In the meantime, perhaps someone from MathWorks can comment on the discrepancies between various Cody sites. For instance, the link LY Cao posted shows 15128 players earned the Solver badge (as of now), but this link (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/activities?sort=&term=type%3ABadge) only accounts for 7962 total badges earned.

LY Cao on 29 Sep 2015

yes,it's very strange,at the bottom of that page it shows "5951 – 6000 of 6,245"

Jan Orwat on 30 Sep 2015

Somewhere between 2014-2015 cody activity pages lost about 150k entries i believe it happened when cody suffered from spamming attack. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/trendy/plots/675 According to this plot, it was about a half of entries cody had that time. (Perhaps "too strong" antispam filters?) Lot of other things were affected too. You cannot see some older solutions (sometimes direct link works, if you know the solution number). Here is another good example: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/badges/12 http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/players?term=badge%3A%22Celebrity%22
How many players awarded this badge? 5? 10? 11?

Jan Orwat on 30 Sep 2015

By now probably the most accurate data are stored in José trend http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/trendy/trends/2048 which is recording since July 2013

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