February 19-20

Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 1:23-2:30

     Toward the end of the week, I continued with working on the app. I almost have the Python script uploading data to our database, except that since Python doesn't allow you to declare data types, the script kept giving me errors about using a set when I meant the variable to be a list. After I remedied that problem, I very shortly ran into another. The data that I had scraped from the high school site was impossible to parse the way it was. There is no common format in the information that I received from the online table.  I can't parse by spaces because some of the club names have spaces in them, I can't parse by number because not all of the locations of the clubs are room numbers, some are letters like the auditorium.The entry for byte Club doesn't even have any spaces at all! So, I've decided to try to contact the keeper of the website so that some sort of format can be established by either him or me so that parsing is possible. Without data, I decided to upload test data into the database to make sure that that area of the code was functioning ahead of time. I was able to finish this by the end of the week.
   I think that the app is coming along very nicely. Once I establish a connection with the man who oversees the high school website, I think the rest of the app will be a lot easier. Though there are still some things that we will need to scrape that aren't held in this one location, it will make life a lot easier to be able to make changes for those that are. A lot of the difficulty that we are seeing on the scraping front is simply finding a pattern among the data we collect to make it manageable, usable, and parseable. Being able to edit the code on the other end of the data will cut down the workload on a lot of the areas of the app that we still need to complete. Once all of the scraping is working, we just need to make everything look professional, test, and add in some of our own fun little easter eggs, if we have time.