Alright, so I wanted to mess around with this “ragout” thing I kept hearing about. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could get it to work with NBA data. I’m a huge basketball fan, so this seemed like a fun little project.
First, I had to, you know, actually figure out what ragout is. Turns out, it’s a Python library for, like, pulling in and organizing data from all sorts of places. Think of it as a smart scraper, I guess. It seemed pretty straightforward, but I’m no coding expert, so I was a little nervous.
I started by installing it. That was easy enough, just a simple pip install ragout in the terminal. Boom, done.
Next, I needed some NBA data. I found a website i liked. It had all the stats I could ever want – player points, rebounds, assists, you name it.
I created a new python project, and imported ragout.
Now for the “hard” part – actually using ragout. I looked at the ragout documentation (it wasn’t the best, to be honest, but good enough). It showed how to define “schemas” to tell ragout what data I wanted and where to find it on the webpage. So, I, like, poked around the NBA stats site’s HTML using my browser’s “Inspect” tool. I’m no expert at this, but I managed to find the CSS selectors for the player names, team names, and the stats I cared about.
Then, I wrote some Python code, referencing examples from documantation. It was a bit of trial and error, I won’t lie. I messed up the selectors a few times, got confused by the syntax, the usual stuff when you’re learning something new. But eventually, I got it to pull something.
I started to get a list, not pretty yet. It was just a raw dump of the data, all jumbled together. Progress!
After more tinkering, I figured out how to use ragout’s features to clean things up. I organized the data into a nice, neat table. Player names in one column, team names in another, and then all the stats lined up perfectly. It was actually pretty satisfying to see it all come together.
I saved data to a * now I had a file with all the up to date data.
So, yeah, that’s my ragout NBA adventure. It was a bit of a bumpy ride, but I learned a lot. And now I have a cool little tool to play with NBA stats. Might try adding some visualizations next, or maybe even build a simple web app. Who knows!
