Okay, so I wanted to see how many people were watching my favorite streamers on a certain platform. I could’ve just, you know, looked at the website, but where’s the fun in that? I decided to get my hands a little dirty and play around with some code.
First, I needed to figure out where the data was coming from. I opened up the website and poked around using the developer tools in my browser – you know, that thing you get when you right-click and hit “Inspect”. I looked at the “Network” tab and started watching the requests fly by as I loaded the page.
After some digging, I found a request that looked promising. It was fetching some JSON data, and lo and behold, it contained the viewer counts! Bingo!
Next up, I needed a way to grab this data programmatically. I decided to use Python because, well, it’s pretty easy to use for this kind of stuff. I fired up my trusty code editor and started typing away.
I used the `requests` library to make the same request that my browser was making. It was pretty straightforward – just a simple `get` request to the URL I found earlier.
import requests
response = *("some_api_endpoint")
Once I had the response, I needed to parse the JSON data. Python has a built-in `json` library for that, so I used `*()` to turn the response text into a Python dictionary.
import json
data = *(*)
Now, I had the data in a nice, structured format. I could access the viewer counts by navigating through the dictionary. It was something like `data[‘streams’][0][‘viewer_count’]` to get the viewer count of the first stream. The exact structure depends on how the API is designed, of course.
I looped through all the streams in the data and printed out the streamer’s name and their viewer count. Just a simple `for` loop did the trick.
Used the browser’s developer tools to find the API endpoint.
Used Python’s `requests` library to fetch the data.
Used Python’s `json` library to parse the JSON response.
Looped through the data and extracted the viewer counts.
And that’s it! I had a little script that could tell me the viewership of all the live streams. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was a fun little project, and I learned a bit more about how websites work under the hood.
It’s pretty cool to see how you can pull data from websites and use it for your own purposes. I’m thinking of maybe building a little dashboard to track my favorite streamers’ viewership over time. Who knows!
