15 March 2015
Late saturday night/Sunday morning with everyone excited about the cricket match between Pakistan and Ireland, I had an urge to check what was going on in the Tennis world. Knowing Indian Wells had just started, I quickly needed to find who all my favourite players will be playing. Looking at the draw and how outdated it looked I decided to have some with it.
I have been meaning to dive in to D3 for quite some time but never really found a project or motivation to use it on. There are some really cool visualizations we can make using D3 but as a complete beginner I decided to follow a simple one given here:
Scraping the information needed for the draw wasn’t as pretty as I hoped. Hoping there would be a csv or a text format that I could use, I was clearly being too optimistic. But fortunately the website had the draw structured well enough that I could use a little wget and Beautiful Soup to parse out and store the information as json.
In the end it worked out all right. I even managed to get the scores out. Here is the final product link. I’ll definitely be getting more familiar with D3 and get more visualizations out there. You can check out the source code right here