Script: MLS Data from 1996 to 2010

[Matt Hoffman]

Hello. I have written a script that parses data from mlsoccer.com. My purpose is to spur amateur analysis of mls statistics.

As I am neither a programmer nor a math/stats guy, I gratefully welcome any feedback, or better yet, improvements to the code.

The data is all freely accessible at mlsoccer.com. However instead of manually opening each page and copying and pasting the data, it is all done by the script.

Since the program is an interpreted script (ie not compiled), you are free to extend the script to scrape other websites, change which data gets collected and revise the format in which it's saved.

The script is written in Python and requires the BeautifulSoup module. The script is housed under Downloads as mls_scaper.py. It can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/mls-scraper/

Google Code allows users to use Subversion. However setting up Subversion is all way over my head. I would really appreciate someone telling me how to figure this out. Though subversion is likely not necessary as the program--at least for the moment is a single 1.6k file!

You can post feedback, feature requests, bugs, etc on the project's google groups page:
http://groups.google.com/group/mls-scraper-project

If you are just interested in the results, they are posted here:
http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S1772772T4n

Thank you for your time and interest!
Matt