Top Billboard Song Data Scraping Project

Hello everyone! I am a data science major in my first year of college. I made a project to share with all of you today. It will scrap the top song listed on the Billboard Hot-100 and the user can take 5 tries to guess what the top song is! It uses BeautifulSoup and Python to scrape the data and print everything to the terminal.

You can find the repo here.

How it was made

I took inspiration from the geeksforgeeks project, Quote Guessing Game. I used Visual Studio Code as my IDE (Pycharm is another option, but any IDE that works on your respective system is fine), Python as my coding language, and Beautiful Soup as my python library for web scraping.

I first took the Billboard Hot-100 URL and saved the top song and artist as two variables. I then made a simple for loop so the user can take 5 guesses to guess the song. Looking back now, I could’ve used a (while guess != answer and i !=5) and printed the amount of guesses, but given it’s so few guesses, I figured it’s fine to just keep it simple. Maybe I’ll go back and print the number of guesses and just make a local iteration variable, and/or add how many guesses you have left.

Anyway, the program clears the console/terminal at the end with os.system('cls') (if you have MacOS/Linux, use os.system('clear')) and thanks the user for playing.

Issues I ran into

There were two main issues I encountered.

Firstly, I was having trouble getting the answer from the page itself. I am used to web scraping using classes and selenium, so I had to familiarize myself with beautiful soup and find the element using the id instead (the class had some crazy long name, and didn’t even work??). Secondly, I wanted to iterate through each item with a while loop, which would’ve looked something like this:

play = input("do you want to play for the next place? (y/n) ")
while (play.lower == "y"):
  ## same stuff as before, but now using an iteration "i," and treating the search ike finding an item in an array or list. 

However, that is unfortunately not how elements and html works, since each one has a unique id and I wouldn’t be able to iterate through them. I could make a bunch of code blocks for each individual guess, but that feels unecessary based on what I was trying to achieve with this project.

What did we learn?

I learned how to use Beautiful Soup to web scrape in Python, and some syntax errors along the way (as well as considering adding some user friendly features along the way.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading, and just a reminder to check out the project and run it yourself here.