Function request: get_player_ids

[py9mrg]

Hello,

Thanks for this terrific package. One small feature request - a function that can make a list of all player ids (or names - but these aren't always unique - e.g. Ben Davies) for the current season.

get_player_details works great if you have the id or name, as does get_player_id if you know the player name - so what would be great is something like get_player_ids that returns all the player ids (or at least the maximum one, given they're assigned sequentially per season). Then we can do something like:

player_ids <- get_player_ids
*apply / purrr:map_*(player_ids, get_player_details)

to automatically get the details for all players at once. Currently, if I want to do that, I have to do a binary search on the player id until I get the maximum id get_player_details will accept without throwing an error.

[wiscostret]

Hi there, thank you for this comment, and I agree with the conceptual idea. I will include this in the next package update, likely ahead of the new season in August. Or, if you are willing, you can submit a pull request with the functionality, then I will review and merge. Thanks again.

[py9mrg]

Hello, thanks for the reply. Have had a quick look at the code and this seems pretty easy depending how much functionality you want to make inherent to the package. For example, in player_functions.R the function get_player_id has the line(s):

elements <- jsonlite::fromJSON("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/api/bootstrap-static/")$elements

I'm completely new to JSON and the FPL API so I didn't realise that that returns the info for all players for the current GW. That then means that nrow(elements) will return the total number of players - and this can then be used in my example above. e.g. something like:

# I haven't actually run this so may not work as is, but roughly this:
max_id <- nrow(jsonlite::fromJSON("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/api/bootstrap-static/")$elements)
purrr::map_dfr(1:max_id, get_player_details)

As an aside - I really don't understand what FPL are doing as their API is confusing to me. For example, elements above contains completely different columns as get_player_details (which uses $history not $elements from the FPL API) - I mean, why don't they just include all columns in both so elements and history match? Aaaaanyway.

But this is where the questions come of how you want to do this.

• It could be as simple as creating a function like get_player_ids which literally returns the ids (of max id) for the players (maybe a data.frame of name and id?). Obviously this can change during the transfer window(s).
• It could be a function which incorporates that with actually getting the player details - e.g. another function like get_all_player_details.
• Or it could be incorporated into the get_player_details function itself. Something like an all_players = TRUE argument. What do you think?

[wiscostret]

We are now live for the 21-22 season and the function update includes a new function - get_player_ids() - which returns a data frame of all player ids and names. Should make things easier to combine datasets and work with the API data. Thanks for the suggestion!