SmackDown Matches Tonight: Get Ready for These Epic Bouts!

Alright, so last night I was messing around with setting up something kinda cool. I wanted to see if I could get live updates on wrestling match results – specifically, the smackdown matches – straight to my little dashboard thing I’ve been building. Here’s how it went down.

First, I needed to find a way to actually get the data. I started by just googling “smackdown matches tonight results API.” No luck, everything was either some shady website or just news articles that update way later. So, plan B: web scraping. I figured I could grab the info off a wrestling news site. I picked one that seemed relatively clean and had decent formatting. Can’t name it though.

Next, I fired up Python. I’m pretty comfortable with Python, and it’s got some great libraries for this kind of thing. I used requests to grab the HTML content of the website. Basically, I just did:

import requests
url = 'the_website_i_found' #replace with the website, but i am not allowed
response = *(url)
html_content = *

Simple enough, right? Now I had a whole bunch of HTML text. Time to sift through it.

This is where BeautifulSoup comes in. It’s a Python library that makes it easy to parse HTML and XML. I installed it using pip (pip install beautifulsoup4) if you don’t have it, and then I started digging through the HTML structure.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, '*')

I spent a good chunk of time just inspecting the website’s HTML using my browser’s developer tools (right-click, “Inspect”). I was trying to figure out what HTML tags and classes they were using to display the match results. This part is always a little tedious, because every website is different.

After some poking around, I found that the match results were in div elements with a specific class (let’s just call it match_result). So, I used BeautifulSoup to find all those elements:

matches = *_all('div', class_='match_result')

Okay, now I had a list of matches. Each element in that list was a BeautifulSoup object representing one match result. The next step was to extract the actual information I wanted: the names of the wrestlers, and the outcome of the match. This part required even more digging into the HTML structure of each match_result element. I used more find and find_all calls, looking for specific tags and classes within each match element.

Here’s a simplified example of how I extracted the wrestler names:

for match in matches:
team1 = *('span', class_='team1_name').*()
team2 = *('span', class_='team2_name').*()
print(f"{team1} vs {team2}")

I did something similar to extract the winner and any other relevant details. I made sure to use to get rid of any extra whitespace around the text.

Now that I had the match data, I wanted to display it on my dashboard. I’m using Flask for the dashboard, so I just passed the data to my Flask template and rendered it in HTML. I won’t go into all the Flask details here, but it basically looked something like this:

from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)

def index():
# ... (the scraping code from above) ...
return render_template('*', matches=matches_data)

Then, in my template, I looped through the matches_data and displayed the info. Pretty straightforward stuff.

The final piece of the puzzle was to make this update automatically. I didn’t want to have to manually refresh the page every time a match ended. So, I used JavaScript and setInterval to make an AJAX call to my Flask route every few minutes. This way, the dashboard would automatically fetch the latest match results and update the display.

It was a bit of a hacky solution, but it worked! I had a live updating dashboard showing the smackdown match results. It’s not perfect – web scraping is always a bit fragile, because websites change their structure all the time – but it was a fun little project.