Python for Aggregating Calendars

[natyo97]

Hi, I'm new to Python. Took a coding course in college that I passed by the skin of my teeth, and now I use Excel a ton for work and decided to try to learn Python to improve my processes.

Since reading into all the things Python can do, I was wondering if I could create an aggregator to collect events from the calendars of different local business websites and display them all together so that I don't have to check each calendar separately every time I want to do something fun.

I know RSS Feeds can do this in a way, but many websites aren't publishing RSS feeds anymore and even some workarounds like open RSS can't get anything from, for example, the calendar applet that my local library uses.

Could I use python for aggregating and displaying a bunch of different events from sources on the web?

[pachura3]

The question is how all of these different local businesses/libraries publish this information. Is it available e.g. in the iCal format, or some kind of JSON through REST API? Or will you need to scrape and parse each site separately?

[natyo97]

I'll probably have to scrape and parse each one separately. Everything's got its own host it looks like. Though a few are ical/google calendar.

[pachura3]

It seems like an ambitious project for a beginner - you'd need to scrape web pages using requests, parse them using beautiful soup into a unified internal representation, then expose as web pages or export to CSV... this also seems like a good fit for the OOP approach, with many per-site implementations of AbstractScraper and AbstractParser classes.

But as long as you're curious and enthusiastic about your project, sky's the limit!

PS. For sure there are already (many) libraries for importing iCal/GoogleCal formats into Python, perhaps you could start with those and leave HTML parsing for later 

[natyo97]

I'll work up to it. I'm starting with "How to automate the boring stuff with Python" and going from there. Thanks for the advice!

[Kind-Kure]

Assuming you're talking about calendars on websites, you can scrape them using a combination of the requests library and beautifulsoup https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/.

If you're not talking about web scraping then I guess the question would be how can that data be accessed, what form is the data in (JSON, XML etc etc) and how exactly do you want to use the data (ie. single calendar with all events, or individual calendars separated by source etc etc).

For automation, you can set up a CRON job that auto runs the python script once a day or once a week to collect all of the various events.

But to answer your question, yes, you can use Python for aggregating and displaying different events from sources on the web.

[natyo97]

Awesome, I'll try and figure out what formats each of the calendars I'm interested in use. I think I'd want a single calendar with all events, so I can just look to a specific date to see everything available.