Okay, so here’s the lowdown on my little project, the “james lawson high school football” thing. It was a bit of a rollercoaster, but hey, that’s how you learn, right?
First off, the idea. I wanted to see if I could scrape some data on the James Lawson High School football team. You know, stats, schedules, maybe some player info. Just a fun little side hustle to brush up my web scraping skills. Thought it would be straightforward, a quick in-and-out job.
So, I started looking for a website. Turns out, finding a consistently updated source for high school football info can be tricky! Some sites are outdated, others are paywalled, and some are just plain messy. I eventually stumbled upon one that seemed promising – it had a schedule and some basic team info. Not perfect, but a starting point.
Next up, the scraping itself. I pulled out my trusty Python and BeautifulSoup. Got the page, parsed the HTML, and started trying to extract the data I needed. This is where the fun began…and by fun, I mean wrestling with HTML structures that made absolutely no sense. Tables within tables, divs inside divs, it was a wild ride.
- The schedule was a beast. Each game was in a separate row, but the date and opponent were in different columns, sometimes with extra text I didn’t need. I had to use a bunch of string manipulation to clean it up and get it into a usable format.
- Player stats were even worse. They weren’t even in a table! It was just a bunch of paragraphs with names and numbers scattered all over the place. I tried using regex, but it was a nightmare. Ended up having to manually identify the patterns and write some custom code to extract the data.
Cleaning the data was a whole other thing. Typos, inconsistencies, abbreviations… you name it. I spent a good chunk of time just going through the data and making sure everything was accurate and consistent. It was tedious, but crucial. Garbage in, garbage out, right?
Finally, I got everything into a CSV file. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. I could now see the schedule, the scores (when I could find them), and some basic player stats. The whole thing took way longer than I expected, probably a good 5-6 hours all told.
What did I learn? A few things:
- Web scraping is never as easy as it looks.
- HTML can be a real pain.
- Data cleaning is essential.
Would I do it again? Maybe. It was definitely a good learning experience, and now I have a better understanding of how to tackle these kinds of projects. Plus, I now know a little more about James Lawson High School football! Next time, though, I might try to find a better data source first. Lesson learned!
