BasketballScrapeR

BasketballScrapeR is a python web scraper that downloads data from European basketball leagues in the BigDataBall format.

At the moment the only supported league is the Italian National League (LBA).

Download andset up

You can download BasketballScrapeR from the command line:

git clone https://github.com/francescoolivo/BasketballScrapeR.git
cd BasketballScrapeR

From there, you can set up the Conda environment:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate BasketballScrapeR

Then you are ready to go!

Usage

You can download the data in csv format by typing:

python run.py -l LBA -s 2021-2022

This downloads the last LBA season, and saves it by default in the csvs directory inside the repository.

In case you want to save the files in a different directory you can simply add the output parameter:

python run.py -l LBA -s 2021-2022 -o directory

In both the previous cases you only download data from the last season. If you don't pass the -s argument, by default the script will download all possible data in the history of the Italian League. You are free to do it, but know in advance that the code has been tested only for the last two seasons, so you will likely find terminating errors due to play-by-play errors.

For this reason, in case you are interested only in the box-scores, you can run the script ignoring play-by-play:

python run.py -l LBA -s 2018-2019 --ignore_pbp

Also, you can edit some minor details such as the separators to use for decimal number and csv files. You can change the default ones by using the --decimal_separator and the --csv_separator flags. For instance if you want to use ; as csv separator and , as decimal separator, you can simply run:

python run.py -l LBA -s 2021-2022 --decimal_separator "," --csv_separator ";" 

You should know that due to server-side errors play-by-play logs for the 2020-2021 and previous seasons are incomplete and sometimes faulted.

Future developments

In the next months I will try to create a scraper also for Euroleague and for other leagues.

Also, I will translate the package in R.