DBB Ranking Parser

Extract league rankings from the DBB (Deutscher Basketball Bund e.V.) website.

This library has been extracted from the web application behind the website of the BTB Royals Oldenburg (a basketball team from Oldenburg, Germany) where it has proven itself for many, many years.

Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• lxml

Installation

Install this package via pip:

$ pip install dbb-ranking-parser

Because of the dependency on lxml, this will also require the header files for the targeted Python version as well as those for libxml2 and libxslt.

On Debian Linux, one should be able to install these from the distribution's repositories (as the 'root' user):

# aptitude update
# aptitude install python3.7-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

Apart from that (for example, if those packages are not yet installed) it might be easier to install Debian's pre-built binary packages for lxml instead:

# aptitude update
# aptitude install python-lxml

Usage

To fetch and parse a league ranking, the appropriate URL is required.

It can be obtained on the DBB website. On every league's ranking page there should be a link to a (non-"XL") HTML print version.

Its target URL should look like this (assuming the league's ID is 12345): http://www.basketball-bund.net/public/tabelle.jsp?print=1&viewDescKey=sport.dbb.views.TabellePublicView/index.jsp_&liga_id=12345

The league ID has to be identified manually in any of the URLs specific for that league (ranking, schedule, stats).

For convenience, specifying only the league ID is sufficient; the URL will be assembled automatically. (Obviously, this might break when the URL structure changes on the DBB website.)

Programmatically

from dbbrankingparser import load_ranking_for_league


league_id = 12345

ranking = list(load_ranking_for_league(league_id))

top_team = ranking[0]
print('Top team:', top_team['name'])

The URL can be specified explicitly, too:

from dbbrankingparser import load_ranking_from_url


URL = '<see example above>'

ranking = list(load_ranking_from_url(URL))

Note that a call to a load_ranking_* method returns a generator. To keep its elements around, and also to access them by index, they can be fed into a list (as shown above).

On the Command Line

The package includes a command line script to retrieve a league's rankings non-programmatically, as JSON. It requires a league ID as its sole argument:

$ dbb-ranking-parser get 12345
[{"name": "Team ACME", "rank": 1, …}]

Via HTTP

Also included is an HTTP wrapper around the parser.

To spin up the server:

$ dbb-ranking-parser serve
Listening for HTTP requests on 127.0.0.1:8080 ...

The server will attempt to look up a ranking for requests with an URL part of the form /<league id>:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/12345
[{"name": "Team ACME", "rank": 1, …}]

Docker

DBB Ranking Parser can also be run in a Docker container. This avoids the local creation of a virtual environment and the installation of the packages, or be useful in a deployment where containers are used.

Building a Docker image requires:

• Docker being installed
• a source copy of the dbb-ranking-parser package

In the package path:

$ docker build -t dbb-ranking-parser .

This should build a Docker image based upon Alpine Linux and which includes Python 3, lxml and the DBB Ranking Parser itself. It should be roughly 70 MB in size.

Running the Docker container accepts the same arguments as the command line script.

To fetch a single ranking:

$ docker run --rm dbb-ranking-parser get 12345
[{"name": "Team ACME", "rank": 1, …}]

To spin up the HTTP server on port 7000 of the host machine:

$ docker run -p 7000:8080 --rm dbb-ranking-parser serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080

The --rm option causes a container (but not the image) to be removed after it exits.

Copyright:	2006-2021 Jochen Kupperschmidt
License:	MIT, see LICENSE for details.
Website:	http://homework.nwsnet.de/releases/4a51/#dbb-ranking-parser