The concept is simple, scrape a website for the top teams of all time and let the user pick a team to read more about.
Finding a website to scrape was a bit of a challenge for me. I wanted to find a website that was not going to be incredibly difficult to scrape as that was not the focus of the project. The focus was OOP ( Object Oriented Programming).
My project uses 3 classes : Scraper, Team, CLI
My Scraper is responsible for for getting the information from my site using Nokogiri to parse the HTML.
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(BASE_URL))
team_info = doc.css("#hub_resp_main .full.module.moduleText")[1..10].reverse
team_info.collect do |element|
This class has two attribute (objects), name and description. As you can see below, after setting my attributes I instantiate my Team objects using these attributes as arguments.
name = element.css("h2").text
description = element.css("p").text
Team.new(name, description)
My Scraper class is directly interacting with my Team class that holds my initialize method
def initialize(name, description)
@name = name
@description = description
@@all << self
end
This instance method allows me to instantiate only with attributes i see fit and storing them in an array.
My CLI class is what gives the application life. Here is where I created all the behaviors that i wanted for for my application. Starting with an instance method that holds the order i want my obects executing in.
def run
greeting
list_teams
Scraper.scrape_team_info
list_msg
call
end
As you can see here, I am calling on my class method here as it in order to intantiate all of my objects. I have created instance methods to allow the user see the list of teams, to allow a user to input , and to allow the user to exit. I also have a method that allows the program to loop around until the user is ready to exit.
I had many struggles, the major one was understanding the difference between procedural and object oriented programming in practice. Making my code more dynamic and less likely to break was a huge learning block for me. This small app is just the starting point for me, I plan to do great things in the future. My goal is to keep learning and keep pushing forward, because i know that every struggle is also a learning experience.