Build your own Cricket Notification using Python

Today we are going to learn how to do web scraping using Python. I  am a big fan of cricket. So I decided to make a script that scrapes data from Cricinfo and gives a notification to the user. We are using the request module to fetch the URL and beautifulsoup4 for web scraping. 

Prerequisites

Install the following packages using pip

pip install beautifulsoup4

pip install requests

pip install lxml

Notify-send for Linux its pre-installed for window installation using the link

Let's dive into the code

import all the dependencies

import requests  ## for fetching the URL

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup ## for web parsing

import os

import time

Fetch contents from URL using the request module

url="https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/india-in-south-africa-2021-22-1277060/south-africa-vs-india-2nd-odi-1277083/live-cricket-score"
response  = requests.get(url)

Here using we trigger a GET request to the specified URL( Live match was going on while the script was done)

Find the required div and score using beautifulsoup4

This is the entire screen when taken in the browser. I need only the live score for batting div.

Entire screen

batting team div

So, I have inspected the webpage and found the class of live scorecard which is “match-info match-info-MATCH match-info-MATCH-full-width”

To get html tag  with the class

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "lxml")
score_parent = soup.find('div', attrs = {'class':'match-info match-info-MATCH match-info-MATCH-full-width'})

Here, first, we give the entire content from the URL to BeautifulSoup. This will return a BeautifulSoup object. Then I find all the div with the required class. Then find the batting team div using the same find function

batting_team_div = score_parent.find("div", attrs={"class": "team"})
name_div = batting_team_div.find('p', attrs = {'class': 'name'})
overs_div = batting_team_div.find('span', attrs={"class": 'score-info'})
score_div = batting_team_div.find_all('span', attrs={"class": "score"})

Extract text from the div

In the last step, we get all the required divs. In this step, we get the text from the div using the text attribute.

batting_team_name = name_div.text

This will give you the name of the batting team. We generate a new string with all details using the following steps

batting_team_name = name_div.text
display_text = ""

if batting_team_name:
        display_text += batting_team_name
        display_text += " "

overs_text = overs_div.text
    if overs_text:
        display_text += overs_text
        display_text += " "

scores = []
for span in score_div:
    scores.append(span.text.replace("\xa0", " "))
scores_string = "".join(scores)
if scores_string:
        display_text += scores_string

Show Notification on the screen

cmd = f'notify-send "Cricket Score" "{display_text}"'
os.system(cmd)

Using the os module we will trigger the notify-send command. Notify-send is a command for giving notifications on the screen. Its syntax is notify-send <title> <text to display>

Output will look like this

Make an Infinite loop and call every second

starttime = time.time()
while True:
    print("tick")
    time.sleep(60.0 - ((time.time() - starttime) % 60.0))
    get_score_and_notify()

This is an infinite loop that will call our function every 60 s.

You can clone the entire code from the repository from here

We can do web scraping for many purposes like collecting table data from websites, image collection, link collections, etc.

I hope you learned about web scraping. Please share your suggestions at afsal@parseltongue.co.in

Happy coding!