FutureWarning: Passing literal html to 'read_html' is deprecated and will be removed in a future version

[esqew]

The latest run of our test cases has highlighted that the current paradigm we use to pass raw HTML from mechanicalsoup to a pandas' DataFrame structure is in the process of being deprecated as of pandas@2.1.0, and some warnings are now being thrown as a result when using a pandas version >= 2.1.0:

Deprecated since version 2.1.0: Passing html literal strings is deprecated. Wrap literal string/bytes input in io.StringIO/io.BytesIO instead.

^Source

This will necessitate a small change to several lines in the current codebase, namely:

• conference.py:63
• conference.py:66
• conference.py:83
• conference.py:110
• conference.py:142
• conference.py:171
• misc.py:31
• misc.py:69
• misc.py:106
• misc.py:135
• misc.py:174
• misc.py:237
• misc.py:266
• summary.py:40
• summary.py:98
• summary.py:156
• summary.py:204
• summary.py:250
• summary.py:349
• summary.py:367
• summary.py:418
• summary.py:434
• FanMatch.py:55
• team.py:29
• team.py:92

While I can't say I'm quite up to speed on what the rationale for this change is, the fix itself should be particularly easy even when considering backwards compatibility for Python versions >= 3.8 for which we currently test compatibility, since io.StringIO has been available in Python core since pre-3.x. Using conference.py:63 as an example, its fixed version would become:

from io import StringIO
# ...
conf_df = pd.read_html(StringIO(str(table)))[0]