Alright so today I wanna talk about figuring out how to track that CFR Cluj match score properly. Man, this thing became way more of a project than I thought.
The Trigger
So I missed the CFR Cluj game last weekend. Big match too. Tried finding the final score afterwards? Forget it. Jumped between two news sites, one sports app, and had like five tabs open – info was scattered, wrong, or late. Super frustrating.
Hunting Down the Info
Figured, why not build something tiny myself? Just to ping a few trusted places and get the latest score without the circus. Sounded simple.
- First Stop: Found what looked like a solid site updating scores fast. Tried the usual “inspect element” trick, hunting for unique CSS IDs near the score. Zero luck.
- Moving On: Another site looked promising. Fumbled around looking for API clues in their network requests. Saw something, tried building a request. Got blocked. Tried changing headers? Nada.
- Plan C: Found a page that seemed reliable, updating manually. Felt desperate. Thought, “Fine, scrape it then.” Spent way too long writing nasty regular expressions trying to grab just the score line (“CFR Cluj 2 – 1 OpponentTeam”) from the whole mess of HTML.
The Frankenstein Code
Honestly, it ended up messy. Like putting a puzzle together in the dark.
Couldn’t get the perfect Python library doing one thing, so used bits and pieces. One script tried grabbing the page with the regex, another tried parsing if the structure looked okay-ish. It felt like duct tape and hope. Getting it to reliably return just the final score, with team names and maybe the time updated? Took me ages. Kept breaking if the page layout shifted even a tiny bit.
Yeah, It “Worked”… Kinda
After wrestling with it most of the afternoon, I had this little command-line thingy. Type python cluj_*, and sometimes, if the sites played nice and hadn’t changed, it spat out “CFR Cluj 2 – 1 OpponentTeam – Final”. Felt like a win, kinda.
Reality Check
But seriously, the effort?
- Way too fragile. Any site update breaks it.
- Felt shady scraping their stuff, even if it’s public.
- Took me way longer than just… checking the score manually would have taken me months.
My partner literally yelled “Dinner!” three times while I was neck-deep in HTML tags trying to make sense of that stupid page layout. The kid needed help with homework. Total time sinkhole.
The Point?
Sometimes the straightest path is just using that app or site everyone else uses, even if it annoys you. Trying to automate what they already do? Way harder than it seems. Got a basic score scraper working, but it’s sitting in a virtual drawer now. Probably gonna delete it eventually.
