Okay, so today I decided to dive into the world of the Isle of Man TT races and figure out how to pull a list of winners. It wasn’t as straightforward as I initially thought, but hey, that’s half the fun, right?
Getting Started
First things first, I needed a plan. I figured the best way to do this was to probably scrape some website. I’m no coding wizard, but I’ve dabbled with Python before, so I thought I’d give that a shot.
The Process
I started by firing up my trusty old text editor and importing a couple of libraries – I think they were called ‘requests’ and ‘BeautifulSoup’. Honestly, I just copied and pasted that part from some tutorial I found online. These things supposedly help you grab and then pick apart website data.
Next up, finding a good website. I Googled around and found a few sites with race results, but some were a real mess, all tables and confusing layouts. I finally found one that looked, you know, somewhat organized.
Then came the tricky bit. I had to use those Python libraries to basically tell my computer, “Hey, go to this website, find the table with the race results, and grab all the names of the winners.” It was a lot of trial and error, I’m not gonna lie. I kept getting errors, or I’d grab the wrong data, like the names of the bikes instead of the riders!
I spent a good hour, maybe more, just tweaking the code, adding bits, deleting bits, Googling error messages like “how to not suck at Python”. It was a mess, my desk was covered in coffee cups and scribbled notes.
Making Sense of it All
Eventually, I got something that resembled a list of winners. But it was raw, like, just a big block of text. So, I had to figure out how to clean it up. I learned this other thing using regular expressions. Again, I don’t have much experience, I just learned a little bit.
I used these regular expressions to pull out just the names, and then I used some more Python code to stick them into a nice, neat list. I even figured out how to get rid of some weird extra characters that kept popping up.
The Result
Finally, after all that wrestling with code, I had a list! It wasn’t perfect, and I’m sure there’s a way more elegant way to do it, but it was my list, built from scratch. I felt like I’d actually accomplished something, even if it was just a list of names.
It might sound messy, but it was rewarding, It’s like, you start with nothing, just an idea, and then you bash your head against the keyboard for a few hours, and suddenly, you have something tangible. Plus, I learned a bunch of stuff along the way, even if I did forget half of it already!
