Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I wrestled with getting the Bradford City football fixtures. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, lemme tell ya.
First off, I started by just Googling “Bradford City fixtures”. Seemed simple enough, right? Nah. I got a bunch of sports sites, but they were all covered in ads and pop-ups. Felt like I was navigating a minefield just to find the schedule. I was looking for something clean, something easy to read.
Then I thought, okay, maybe the official Bradford City website has what I need. So I went there, burrowed through the menus… and finally found their fixtures page. It was decent, but it was just a list. I wanted something I could easily import into my calendar – ya know, like a proper schedule.
That’s when I remembered I could probably scrape the data myself. I’ve done it a few times before with other sites. So, I fired up my trusty Python and Beautiful Soup. For those who aren’t familiar, Beautiful Soup is a library that lets you parse HTML and XML. Basically, it helps you pull specific info from a website’s code.
I inspected the Bradford City fixtures page, figured out the HTML structure, and started writing my script. It was messy at first. I had to figure out which tags contained the date, the opponent, the time, and the location. There were a few divs and spans that were throwing me off, but after a bit of trial and error, I got it working.
My script would grab all the fixture info and dump it into a list. Cool, but not exactly user-friendly. I needed to put it into a format I could actually use. That’s where CSV came in. I wrote some more code to format the data and save it as a CSV file. Now I could open it in Excel or Google Sheets – way better.
But I wasn’t done yet. I wanted to get this into my Google Calendar so I could get reminders and stuff. Luckily, Google Calendar has an API. I messed around with that for a while. It took a little digging to figure out the authentication and how to format the data correctly, but eventually, I got it to automatically add all the fixtures to my calendar. Victory!
Here’s the gist of what I did:
- Googled it, got frustrated.
- Went to the official site, found a list.
- Scraped the data using Python and Beautiful Soup.
- Formatted the data into a CSV file.
- Used the Google Calendar API to add the fixtures to my calendar.
It wasn’t the smoothest process, but I learned a thing or two along the way. And now I’ve got all the Bradford City fixtures right where I need them. Plus, I’ve got a reusable script that I can tweak for other teams if I want. Worth the effort, I’d say.
