Alright, so let me tell you about this thing I was messing around with the other day – the English Premiership rugby table. It all started when I was trying to figure out who was actually in the lead.
First off, I just straight up went to Google. Typed in “English Premiership table rugby” and bam, a bunch of websites popped up. ESPN, BBC Sport, you name it. I clicked on a couple, but I wanted something…more. I wanted to mess with the data myself, ya know?
So, I decided, why not try and grab the data and play around with it myself. I thought maybe there would be some public API, but no luck there. So I ended up screen-scraping one of the sites. Don’t judge, it’s just for personal use!
I wrote a quick Python script with Beautiful Soup to parse the HTML table. It was a bit of a pain ’cause the HTML was a mess, but I got it working eventually. I extracted the team names, games played, points for, points against, and of course, the league points.
Here’s the basic steps I followed:
- Inspect the website: Right click on the website and select “Inspect Element” to understand the HTML structure of the table.
- Use Requests library: To fetch the HTML content from the website.
- Use Beautiful Soup: To parse the HTML content and navigate through the table.
- Extract the data: Target the specific HTML tags and extract the team name, matches played, points, etc.
- Store the Data: Organize and store data into lists or dictionaries for processing.
Once I had the data, I dumped it into a Pandas DataFrame. Makes everything way easier to work with. I cleaned up the data a bit, converted the points to integers, and started doing some calculations.
I wanted to see not just the current standings, but also the point difference between teams, the average points scored per game, and all that jazz. So I added some calculated columns to the DataFrame.
Then, I messed around with visualizing the data using Matplotlib. Simple bar charts showing the point differences, scatter plots comparing points scored vs. points conceded – nothing fancy, but it gave me a better feel for how the teams were performing.
It was a fun little project. Took me a few hours, but I learned a bit, and now I have a script that I can run whenever I want to check the Premiership table without having to rely on those ad-filled sports websites. Plus, I can customize the data to see exactly what I want!
Basically, start with a question, grab the data, clean it up, and then just play around with it. You’d be surprised what you can find!
