Scraping Manual Assistant

Intro

Scraping Manual Assistant (Abbreviated to ScrapingManAss) is a video game manual downloader.

Design

ScrapingManass is designed with two modules:

The first part is the database-populator. It utillizes selenium to scrape gamesdatabase.org. Here it finds information regarding the games.

The other part is the manual-downloader. With the records made in the first module, this module aquires, sanitizes and converts it into formatted request urls, attempts to download on a given url and saves the result as a pdf.

Usage

• --help -h : Shows the help menu
• --list -s : Show a list of all systems and their corresponding ID
• --scrapedatabase -s : Populate the database for taget system(s)
• --download -d : Download manuals for games present in the database
• --both -b : Activate both the scraper and the downloader
• --yes -y : Skips the confirmation on which systems are targeted

Arguments

The options -s, -d and -b accepts an arbitrary amount of numbers, so for instance, if you want to scrape several systems, just add the system ID (given from either watching systems.json or launching the script with -l)

ScrapingManAss also supports dashes between numbers as a range selector (x-y)

Example:

• python ./scrapingmanass.py -l -> Show all the systems with their id's
• python ./scrapingmanass.py -s 1 2 3 4 5 -> Populate the database with entries from systems 1 to 5
• python ./scrapingmanass.py -b 1-25 -> Populate the database AND download the manuals from systems 1 to 25

Requirements

The packages used in this project is mentioned in requirements.txt.

• Selenium is needed to scrape the webpages.
• Sqlite3 for the database

Apply all packages for easy start:

pip install -r requirements.txt