Kind of a long winded question and I probably just need someone to point me in the right direction. I'm building a web scraper to grab basketball player info from ESPN's website. The URL structure is pretty simple in that each player card has a specific id in the URL. To obtain information I'm writing a loop from 1-~6000 to grab players from their database. My question is whether there is a more efficient way of doing this?
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib2 import urlopen
import requests
import nltk
import re
age = [] # Empty List to store player ages
BASE = 'http://espn.go.com/nba/player/stats/_/id/' # Base Structure of Player Card URL
def get_age(BASE): #Creates a function
#z = range(1,6000) # Create Range from 1 to 6000
for i in range(1, 6000): # This is a for loop
BASE_U = BASE + str(i) + '/' # Create URL For Player
r = requests.get(BASE_U)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text)
#Prior to this step, I had to print out the soup object and look through the HTML in order to find the tag that contained my desired information
# Get Age of Players
age_tables = soup.find_all('ul', class_="player-metadata") # Grabs all text in the metadata tag
p = str(age_tables) # Turns text into a string
#At this point I had to look at all the text in the p object and determine a way to capture the age info
if "Age: " not in p: # PLayer ID doesn't exist so go to next to avoid error
continue
else:
start = p.index("Age: ") + len("Age: ") # Gets the location of the players age
end = p[start:].index(")") + start
player_id.append(i) #Adds player_id to player_id list
age.append(p[start:end]) # Adds player's age to age list
get_age(BASE)
Any help, even small, would be much appreciated. Even if it's just pointing me in the right direction, and not necessarily a direct solution
Thanks, Ben
