Rainbow Lounge

Every so often, I decide I want to watch all the matches a wrestler has had that meet some criteria (e.g. in a particular promotion or against a particular opponent), and usually, I have a bit more fun if I don't go into every match knowing who's going to win and how many minutes it's going to take them to do it. Cagematch.net is great for listing out all the matches I'm interested in, but it's pretty rough for the latter: the "Matches" view on a wrestler's page is comprehensive but includes the results, and the "Matchguide" view is spoiler-free but doesn't include every match.

Fortunately, we can make the computer give us the info we want and nothing more. We're going to use fq for this, which is a very general tool for parsing, transforming, and making queries over structured data formats (if you're familiar with jq, it's basically "jq but for everything instead of just for JSON").

I recently subscribed to RevPro's streaming service because I wanted to watch more Safire Reed matches, so to start this process off I did a Cagematch query for a list of all of Safire's matches in RevPro and downloaded the page (as matches.html). A typical entry in the table looks something like this (I've added some indentation and removed the href attributes from the a tags to make it easier to see the structure):

<span class="MatchCard">
  <a>Safire Reed</a> defeats <a>Anita Vaughan</a> (10:33)
</span>

<div class="MatchEventLine">
  <a>RevPro Live In London 91</a> - Online Stream @ 229 The Venue in London, England, UK
</div>

The easiest useful thing we can do is to just grab the name of the event. If we run fq with just . as the command, it'll show us how it parsed the entire input: fq -d html '.' matches.html (maybe pipe it to less, since this is quite a bit of output). If we look for "MatchEventLine" in there, we'll find that the entries we're interested in look something like this:

{
  "#text": "- Online Stream @ 229 The Venue in London, England, UK",
  "@class": "MatchEventLine",
  "a": {
    "#text": "RevPro Live In London 91",
    "@href": "https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=381436"
  }
}

fq uses the grep_by function to recursively find all objects that match a given condition. We'll use that to get all the "MatchEventLine" objects:

fq -d html 'grep_by(."@class"=="MatchEventLine")' matches.html

From here, we want to narrow our focus down to the a element, and get just its inner "#text" (at this point I'm adding -r to tell fq to produce raw output, since I don't need the name of each event to be wrapped in double quotes):

fq -d html -r 'grep_by(."@class"=="MatchEventLine").a."#text"' matches.html

If you're wondering why "@class" and "#text" are in double quotes but a isn't, it's because @ and # are special characters. You could write "a" instead of a in the middle of the chain of selectors, but you don't have to.

This will give us our list of all the event names and nothing else (Cagematch's default sorting is newest-to-oldest, so if we want to watch in order, we should start at the bottom):

RevPro Live In London 106
RevPro Live In Coventry
RevPro Live In London 105
RevPro Live In London 101
RevPro Raw Deal 2025
...

Tada! Now we can go spend the whole day watching indie wrestling instead of whatever else we were supposed to be doing. If you're looking for a rec, Safire vs Kanji from Live In London 97 is available for free (I haven't actually watched it yet, but their match at Live In London 78 has one of my favorite final three-minute stretches of any match ever, so this one is probably awesome too).

Or, we can keep tinkering....