Looking for MTG cards data?

• The output for this set of scripts is included in the output folder.
• A better source for this information might be: http://mtgjson.com/

Introduction

This project uses the Python 'Scrapy' library to harvest data about cards for Magic: The Gathering and save them locally in a JSON format, along with previews of the card images.

Prerequisites

To begin, you will need Python 2.7 installed, and will need to install the Scrapy library, which you can install with the command:

easy_install scrapy

Windows

If you're on Windows, you might find it tough to install all the required libraries, without Visual Studio 2008. Luckily, you can find pre-built packages for Windows at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#libxml-python

Mac

If you're on Mac, installing libxml is still an absolute PITA. But it's possible.

Running the Project

Once Scrapy is installed and running correctly on your machine, you can execute a crawl with the following command:

scrapy crawl cards -o ../output/data/items.json -t json

This will go off and spider the hardcoded URLs for card data, output the results in JSON format under the output/data/items.json file. Images associated with the cards are saved under the images directory, with the MD5 hash of the image used as the filename.

Output

A saved copy of the output from the project is available in the output branch and/or the output folder.