Okay, so I wanted to keep better track of the Vienna Open scores, and I figured, why not build something myself? I’m no coding expert, but I like tinkering.
First Steps: Finding the Data
First things first, I needed to find a place to get the scores. I did some searching, and it looked that finding a good, free source was trickier than I thought. Many places either hid the data or wanted me to pay.
Getting My Hands Dirty: Scraping
I Decided to try and “scrape” the data. It’s like, manually copying the info, but with a script. I used python and a library, and it was messy. Lots of trial and error. The website’s code was a bit of a jumble, and I had to figure out how to pick out just the score parts I needed.
Here’s the basic idea of the code, super simplified:
- I tell the script to go to that webpage.
- I tell it, “Hey, find the parts that look like score boxes.”
- I had to clean the data up a bit, like taking out extra spaces.
Making Sense of it All
Once I get data, I put the data into a simple file. Nothing fancy, just a way to see if I got it right.I ran into some snags. Sometimes the website would change a little, and my script would break. I’d have to go back and adjust it, which was annoying, but hey, it’s part of the learning.
What’s Next?
Right now, I can get the scores, but it’s not automatic. I have to run the script myself. In the future, maybe I’ll figure out how to make it run on its own, like every hour or something. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll even build a little website to show the scores. But for now, I’m pretty happy I got this far!
It’s not perfect, but it works, and I learned a ton. That’s the best part, right?
