Okay, so yesterday I was messing around, trying to get some player data for the Lions and Chargers. It was kinda a pain, but I finally got it working.
First thing I did was hunt around for an API. Found a couple, but most of them were either pay-to-use or just super clunky. Ended up settling on one that looked kinda free-ish, but I had to do some digging to figure out how to actually use it.
Then, I fired up Python. You know, the usual. Needed to install a couple of libraries – `requests` to actually grab the data, and `json` to make sense of the mess that came back.
`pip install requests`
`pip install json`
Next up, the fun part: actually writing the code. It was pretty straightforward, honestly. Something like this:
import requests
import json
url = "the_api_url_i_found" # obviously, i replaced this with the real url
response = *(url)
if *_code == 200:
data = *(*)
# ... process the data here
else:
print("Oops, something went wrong!")
The trickiest part was figuring out the structure of the JSON. The API was returning some weirdly nested stuff, so I had to poke around with it for a bit to figure out where the player names and stats were hiding. Used `print(*(data, indent=4))` a lot to make it readable.
After I could actually get the player data, I started filtering it down to just the Lions and Chargers. This involved looping through the whole dataset and checking which team each player was on. It was kinda slow, but it worked.
Then I started thinking about how to store all this stuff. I could’ve just dumped it into a text file, but I wanted something a little more structured. So, I decided to write it to a CSV file. Found a handy `csv` library in Python that made it pretty easy.
Here’s roughly how I set that up:
import csv
with open('lions_chargers_*', 'w', newline='') as csvfile:
fieldnames = ['name', 'team', 'position', 'some_other_stat'] # the fields i wanted
writer = *(csvfile, fieldnames=fieldnames)
for player in relevant_players: # after filtering the api data for right teams
'name': player['name'],
'team': player['team'],
'position': player['position'],
'some_other_stat': player['some_other_stat']
Finally, I ran the whole thing and boom, I had a CSV file with all the Lions and Chargers player data. It wasn’t the cleanest code in the world, but it got the job done. Probably spent a couple of hours on it total, mostly just messing around trying to figure out the API.
Lessons learned? APIs are always a pain in the butt, and always double-check your JSON structure before you start coding.
