Alright, lemme tell ya ’bout my Monday Night Raw time project. It was a bit of a chaotic wrestling match against code, but hey, we got there in the end.
The Setup: So, I had this idea, right? I wanted to build a little app that would automatically update me on the latest Monday Night Raw results. I’m a wrestling fan, sue me! I was tired of spoilers, and just wanted a quick heads up so I could watch the highlights later.
Choosing the Weapons (Tools): First things first, I needed my tools. I went with Python – it’s my go-to for quick and dirty projects. Then, I grabbed Beautiful Soup for scraping the wrestling results off the web, and finally, requests to, well, make those requests!
Round 1: Scraping the Web: I started by inspecting the website I planned to pilfer (ethically, of course). I wanted to target specific HTML elements where the match results were listed. This was where Beautiful Soup came in handy. I dug around the HTML, identified the tags I needed, and started writing the scraping code.
- First, I made a request to the website.
- Then, I fed the HTML content to Beautiful Soup.
- Next, I used `find_all` to locate all the relevant `div` tags containing the results.
The Tag Team Partner (Error Handling): Of course, things weren’t always smooth sailing. The website layout changed on me a couple of times, which meant my scraper broke. So, I added some error handling – try-except blocks everywhere! It wasn’t elegant, but it got the job done. I also added some logging so I could see what was going wrong.
The Main Event (Putting it Together): Once I could reliably scrape the results, I needed to format them nicely. I created a function to extract the winner, loser, and match type from each HTML element. I stored all the results in a list, and then printed it out in a readable format.
Post-Match Interview (Future Improvements): Right now, it’s a pretty basic script. But I’m planning on adding a few more features. I want to:
- Set up scheduled tasks to run it automatically every Tuesday morning.
- Push the results to my phone via a notification service.
- Maybe even add some AI to predict the match outcomes! (Okay, maybe not.)
The Crowd Goes Wild (Conclusion): All in all, this Monday Night Raw time project was a fun little exercise. It’s not perfect, but it works. And more importantly, it keeps me up-to-date with the wrestling world without getting spoiled! Plus, it’s always a good feeling to build something that solves a real (even if trivial) problem.
So yeah, that’s my Monday Night Raw coding adventure. Hope you enjoyed the play-by-play!
