Alright, so today I’m gonna talk about how I managed to get the Sheffield Utd score thing working. It was a bit of a headache, but hey, we got there in the end.
First off, I started by thinking, “Okay, where am I gonna get this data from?” Obvious choice, right? The internet! I spent a good chunk of time just googling around for sports APIs. Found a few, some free, some paid. Tried out a couple of the free ones, but they were either unreliable or the data was a bit dodgy. Ended up biting the bullet and signing up for a trial with one of the paid ones. Seemed to have decent coverage and the data looked clean.
Next up, was figuring out how to actually get the data. The API docs were, let’s just say, “not great.” Spent a couple of hours just wrestling with the authentication and figuring out the right endpoints to hit. Used Postman to test everything out, that was a lifesaver. Once I had the data coming back in a JSON format, I was like, “Okay, progress!”
Then came the fun part, actually parsing the JSON and getting the Sheffield Utd score. This is where I got to dust off my Python skills. Wrote a little script that would hit the API, grab the JSON, and then dig through it to find the score. It was a bit fiddly, lots of trial and error. kept printing stuff out to the console to see what was going on, you know, the usual debugging dance.
Here’s a simplified snippet of what the Python code looked like:
- Import the requests library
- Define a function to get the score
- Make API request, catch errors
- Parse the JSON response
- Extract the score
- Return the score
The big problem was the JSON structure. It was nested like crazy! Lots of loops and conditional statements to handle different match states (like, is the game finished or still ongoing?). Finally got it working though, and I could reliably get the Sheffield Utd score. Woohoo!
After I got the score, I want to display it! Simple is better, right? I wrote a little html page and displayed the score. I had to get the score from my Python script into the HTML. I decided to go with Flask because I already had experience with it. I created an API endpoint using Flask, and get the score and show it in the browser.
So there you have it. That’s how I tackled getting the Sheffield Utd score. It was a bit of a journey, but I learned a bunch along the way. Now, if only they could actually win a game…