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Extract ICal from your teams DBB schedule

UPDATE: Just after publishing the post I noticed that the BBL page is available in 2 flavors. The old JSP page still exists and has an actual ICal Export button. Well… at least I now know how to do it on my own. 🙈

Every now and then you run into the limits of a website you’re using. This just happened to me when my sons basketball coach shared the match schedule and I wanted to add the matches to our family calendar. The info is available through www.basketball-bund.net but you can’t get it out of that page easily.

screenshot of the schedule

Time to cook a soup? #

A while ago I ran into a similar problem and used BeautifulSoup4 to extract the data I was looking for. This was my first approach as well, but this time it showed to be harder than I thought. Turns out the page loads most of its information dynamically via JavaScript and every approach I tried just returned the skeleton page.

Plain old REST… #

I found the answer when analyzing the sites network traffic through the Firefox Developer Tools. Besides loading a bunch of ads and tracking stuff it was using a plain old REST API to get the standings, teams and schedule. Using requests it was easy to get the data I was looking for. The structure contained some odd specialties, but that was to be expected and most of my script works around that easily.

Writing ICal #

Python comes with batteries included, but certainly something like writing ICal data is not part of the framework. Luckily there’s a module called ical that helps with that. All I needed to do was to create a new calender, fill it with the events I wanted to have and write it out as an .ics file.

Source #

The code is hosted in a GitHub repo, though it’s not much more than a few lines of main.py. Perhaps it helps someone else get their team organized in a better way.