Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with getting some data on the “Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional de Honduras games”. I’m a big soccer fan, and I thought it would be cool to have easy access to the game schedules, scores, and maybe even some stats.
First, I started by just, you know, Googling around. I typed in stuff like “Liga Nacional de Honduras schedule” and “Honduras soccer games” to see what would pop up. I found a few websites, mostly news sites and the official league site, but nothing that gave me the data in a way that I could easily use.
Then, I started thinking, “Maybe there’s an API for this?”. An API is basically a way for computers to talk to each other and share information. So I searched for “Liga Nacional de Honduras API” and, well, I didn’t find anything official. That was a bummer.
Next, I started thinking about web scraping. It sounds complicated, but basically, it’s just writing a little program to automatically grab information from a website. I’ve done it before, but not on a sports related topic.
Scraping plan
- Find a Reliable Website: I figured I’d start with a website that had the game schedules, scores, and some other details.
- Inspect the Website:I then opened up the website and used my browser’s developer tools. All modern browsers has this function.
- Write a Simple Script: I opened a jupyternotebook and began writing a scraping script to get the information.
- Store the Data: Once I got the data, I wanted to store it somewhere. So I wrote some extra code, and stored the data into a csv file.
It took a bit of trial and error, figuring out the right way to grab the data. Websites can be structured in all sorts of weird ways. But eventually, I got it working! I was able to pull the game dates, the teams playing, and the final scores.
So, that’s where I’m at now. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. I can get the basic game info for the Liga Nacional de Honduras. My next step is to figure out how to automate this, so it runs automatically, to get the latest data.
