A quick tool to scrape the results of the 2015 Boston Marathon.

The usual rigamarole to set up the script:

$ git clone git@github.com:Kobold/scrape_boston_marathon.git
$ cd scrape_boston_marathon
$ mkvirtualenv scrape_boston_marathon
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

$ python main.py # Show the help.
Usage: main.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Pile of commands to scrape the boston marathon results.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  output_csv   Write a csv listing of all entrants.
  output_html  Write all pages in the database into HTML...
  scrape       Pull down HTML from the server into dataset.

How this thing works

First, we have to pull down the actual results HTML. Running python main.py scrape pulls down HTML and jams it into a database using the dataset library. Why a database versus files? *shrug*

$ python main.py scrape
Requesting state 2 - page 0
Requesting state 3 - page 0
Requesting state 4 - page 0
...

Once the HTML is stored locally, we can do whatever we want with it—play around with it without abusing anyone's server.

Output tools

python main.py output_html - A basic example of just dumping all the HTML in the database to HTML files.

python main.py output_csv - A more substantial tool that will scrape all the HTML in the database using BeautifulSoup, then output a csv listing the scraped entrants to whatever filename you specify. It may take a few seconds to run because BeautifulSoup is slow with the html5lib parser.

$ python main.py output_csv entrants.csv
Wrote 821 entrants.